Dr Gerard Criner: Long-term Evaluation New for Patients With Emphysema

Patients with emphysema had an opportunity to participate in a long-term trial, allowing outcomes to be measured over years instead of months, said Gerard Criner, MD, FACP, FACCP, professor and founding chair, Thoracic Medicine and Surgery, at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University.

Today at the at the 2023 American Thoracic Society International Conference, Criner presented long-term data on the EMPROVE trial, which investigated benefits of the Spiration Valve System in patients who have emphysema.

Transcript

Why did you decide to study this topic?

Patients with emphysema suffer from hyperinflation, and that hyperinflation has a significant contribution to the morbidity and mortality of the disease. Over the last 20 years, various attempts of trying to decrease the degree of hyperinflation have included medicines, plus other surgical and less-invasive forms of therapy. There are bronchoscopic techniques; the ones that are approved in the United States are in the endobronchial valves. [The] EMPROVE study was a prospective randomized multicenter controlled trial that was conducted in patients who were hyperinflated with emphysema to see if lobar occlusion could decrease the amount of air trapping and could result in improving the patient outcome measured by improvements in lung function, quality of life, [and] reduction in shortness of breath.

Most of the therapies that have looked at this range of treatments are really focused at patients that are 3 months, 6 months, 12 months in outcome. But when it's brought into clinical practice, the questions that patients ask and providers ask, [is] “How long do these effects last?”

So, the genesis of this long-term evaluation was a look at the durability of the treatment effect, see if it remains, as well as looking at the complications as a result of the therapy in a cohort of patients that were followed up to 5 years after the treatment.