Diuretics, plasma brain natriuretic peptide and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at BNP (Nesiritide).

This study aims to assess the effect of mild diuretics on plasma BNP levels in patients with an acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) who have high plasma concentrations of BNP.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 15 patients taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

Thirty consecutive patients with an acute exacerbation of COPD without any clinical evidence of cor pulmonale who had elevated plasma BNP concentrations (group 1) and 15 patients with stable COPD as controls (group 2) participated in this study.

A mild diuretic treatment in addition to the standard treatment for an acute attack of COPD was randomised to 15 patients in group 1 (group 1A).

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

Because people in this BNP (Nesiritide) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

The remaining patients in group 1 only took standard treatment for acute COPD exacerbation (group 1B).

Plasma BNP concentrations were measured on admission and repeated on the 5th and 10th days.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acute Disease, Case-Control Studies, Diuretics, Forced Expiratory Volume, Natriuretic Peptide, Brain, Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive and Ventricular Dysfunction, Right.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of BNP (Nesiritide) in 15 patients.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Results are reported in around 3 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2007 (The Netherlands journal of medicine), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the BNP (Nesiritide) compound page, all human trials.