Introduction: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a systemic disease associated with impaired cardiac function. A reduction in stroke volume and cardiac output can be present even with normal ejection fraction in these patients. The non-invasivecardiac output measurement (NICOM) is a simple tool to measure stroke volume (SV) and cardiac output (CO). The aim of this study is to examine the reproducibility of the NICOM in patients with COPD.

Method: The Assessment of Risk in Chronic Airways Disease Evaluation (ARCADE) is a longitudinal study of up to 1500 patients with COPD confirmed with spirometry. Thirty patients with no previous CVD were recruited and underwent height and weight measurements before SV and CO. A bioreactance technique was used to measure CO and SV. These were repeated after mean (range) 7(1) days.

Results: Mean ±SD age of patients was 67±7 years, height 165±9.9 cm, weight 74.8±18.2 kg and BMI 27.2±4.7 Kg/m2. Mean SV was 83.6±20.6 ml and 81.6± 20.3 ml at visit 1 and 2 and CO was 5.7±1.1 was 5.7± 1.1 L/min respectively. Repeated measures ANOVA showed no significant difference between subject measurements (Both p-values >0.05). The interclass correlation coefficients (ICC’s) were 0.93 and 0.99 respectively. The Bland and Altman plot shows no systematic bias with slight random error in both measures (Figure1 &2)

Figure 1

Bland and Altman plot for CO.

Figure 2

Bland and Altman plot for SV.

Conclusion: These data indicate that CO and SV are reproducible measured using the NICOM device in patients with COPD and maybe appropriate to assess cardiac function in clinical practice.