Eosinophil Guidance Curbs Steroid Use in Severe COPD - Medscape

Patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) often receive systemic corticosteroids from multiple specialties, and that cumulative exposure is rarely tracked in 1 place. At the same time, the options for reducing reliance on oral steroids have grown, with approvals of dupilumab and mepolizumab for eosinophilic COPD and of depemokimab, a twice-yearly anti-interleukin (IL)-5 agent, for severe asthma.1-4 Clinicians outside pulmonology increasingly manage these patients when specialty access is limited. On October 6, 2026, Mollie Chartoff, FNP-BC, a nurse practitioner on the advanced COPD team at Vanderbilt Lung Institute in Nashville, Tennessee, moderated a virtual clinical forum for advanced practice providers on asthma and COPD. Participants included nurse practitioners and physician assistants in pulmonology, allergy and asthma, dermatology, oncology, and interventional pain practices in Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina. The discussion covered biomarkers, oral corticosteroid (OCS) exposure, biologic selection, and access barriers.

Analysis of Phase 3 clinical trials shows mepolizumab cuts annual steroid exposure and high-dose treatment days for COPD patients.

David Mannino | Professor, University of Kentucky College of Medicine, Lexington, USA; Chief Medical Officer, COPD Foundation Could you tell us what first drew you to respiratory medicine and COPD, and how this interest has developed throughout your career?

Conflicts of interest: Carlin has received conference travel, speaker fees, advisory board, unrestricted investigator-initiated grant, and joint working support from AstraZeneca, Glaxo-Smith Kline, Sanofi-Regeneron, and ResMed. Keywords: Case-finding, COPD, diagnosis, exacerbations, lung cancer screening.

On the opening day of CHEST 2026, the organization's flagship journal highlights a trio of key papers with practice-changing results for COPD. Three key papers that changed practice strategy in the field of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) got a second look Sunday as authors whose work had appeared in CHEST journal detailed key papers from the past 18 months—ranging from twin trials that led to an FDA to a new risk stratification approach. Sunday’s session helped kick off CHEST: the American College of Chest Physicians annual meeting, taking place in Phoenix Arizona.