Study of Cognitive Function in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases

Backgrounds: Cognitive impairment is a frequent feature of COPD, so Cognitive function study should be a part of the initial respiratory assessment in COPD patients especially for those patients presenting with evident or self-reporting symptoms of cognitive deficit.

Objectives: The aim of our work was to study the cognitive function among COPD patients by using specific cognitive function tests and to assess the validity of these tests in detecting this impairment among COPD population.

Subjects and Methods: A cross sectional observational study was carried out on 100 patients with COPD diagnosed according to Global initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease [1] Subjects of the study were selected from Chest Department Outpatients Tanta University Hospitals and Mansoura Chest Hospital Outpatients between March 2019 and November 2020. They were divided into three groups; group I including 34 grade II COPD patients, group II including 32 grade III COPD patients and group III including 34 grade IV COPD patients.

Results: Half of group III patients had severe cognitive impairment compared to 34.4% among group II patients and 26.5% among group I patients with a statistically significant differences in the MMSE between the three studied groups. (x2 =9.699, p=0.015). Group III patients had 29.4% with severe impairment, while group II had 34.4% and group, I had 17.6% with severe impairment with a statistically significant difference in digit symbol test distribution between different studied groups. As regards to Trail A and B tests, group III had high percent impaired test results, compared to group I and II with a statistically significant differences in its distribution between the different studied groups. As regards to Digit Span Tests A and B, there was no statistically significant difference in its distribution between different studied groups.

Conclusions: The Mini Mental State Examination Test may be used as a part of the initial respiratory assessment to give an idea about the cognitive state of the patient and if the patient needs more care for his cognitive status or not.