Awareness about disease and pulmonary rehabilitation in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: A survey study

Purpose: superiority of pulmonary rehabilitation (pr) in patients with copd have been entered the major guidelines of the disease and become gold standard of care in the management of copd. our aim is to evaluate the patients’ awareness about their own illness and pr which supports behavioral interventions by encouraging exercise training, cooperative self-management depending on the patients themselves. materials and methods: the study was included 200 patients. patients who are competent enough to complete the questionnaire and diagnosed as copd according to global inıtıatıve for chronic obstructive lung disease(gold) criteria and at least 1 year on follow patients enrolled in the study. questionnaire which is employed in our study is developed by a review of the current literature and consist of 3 parts. first part aims to investigate socio-demographics like age, gender, education and whereabouts. second part (questions 1-9) evaluate the knowledge and awareness of copd and 3rd part (10-22) investigate the awareness of pr. results: among the patients 93% (n=186) were male and 7% (n=14) were female. mean age was 65.11±10.00 years. mean duration of the disease was 7.8±6.69 years. correct answer rates to the questions “is there another treatment modality for copd other than medication” and “have you ever heard a treatment named pulmonary rehabilitation” were 14.5% and 7.5%, respectively. conclusion: we found that the awareness of pulmonary rehabilitation is very low. therefore, in our opinion it is essential to find out new methods, novel strategies to increase the awareness of pulmonary rehabilitation in copd patients.