Review Article Musculoskeletal Disorders in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Copyright © 2014 Nele Cielen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a lung disease characterized by airway obstruction and inflammation but also accompanied by several extrapulmonary consequences, such as skeletal muscle weakness and osteoporosis. Skeletal muscle weakness is of major concern, since it leads to poor functional capacity, impaired health status, increased healthcare utilization, and evenmortality, independently of lung function.Osteoporosis leads to fractures and is associatedwith increasedmortality, functional decline, loss of quality of life, andneed for institutionalization.Therefore, the presence of the combination of these comorbiditieswill have a negative impact on daily life in patients with COPD. In this review, we will focus on these two comorbidities, their prevalence in COPD, combined risk factors, and pathogenesis. We will try to prove the clustering of these comorbidities and discuss possible preventive or therapeutic strategies. 1