Prediction of gold stage in patients hospitalized with COPD exacerbations using blood neutrophils and demographic parameters as risk factors

BACKGROUND: Patients hospitalized with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbations are unable to complete the pulmonary function test reliably due to their poor health conditions. Creating an easy-to-use instrument to identify the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) stage will offer valuable information that assists clinicians to choose appropriate clinical care to decrease the mortality in these patients. The objective of this study was to develop a prediction model to identify the GOLD stage in the hospitalized exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (ECOPD) patients. METHODS: This prospective study involved 155 patients hospitalized for ECOPD. All participants completed lung function tests and the collection of blood neutrophils and demographic parameters. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was plotted based on the data of 155 patients, and was used to analyze the disease severity predictive capability of blood neutrophils and demographic parameters. A support vector regression (SVR) based GOLD stage prediction model was built using the training data set (75%), whose accuracy was then verified by the testing data set (25%). RESULTS: The percentage of blood neutrophils (denoted as NEU%) combined with the demographic parameters was associated with a higher risk to severe episode of ECOPD. The area under the ROC curve was 0.84. The SVR model managed to predict the GOLD stage with an accuracy of 90.24%. The root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the forced expiratory volume in one second as the percentage of the predicted value (denoted as FEV(1)%pred) was 8.84%. CONCLUSIONS: The NEU% and demographic parameters are associated with the pulmonary function of the hospitalized ECOPD patients. The established prediction model could assist clinicians in diagnosing GOLD stage and planning appropriate clinical care.