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null Unusual lung structures may raise risk of pulmonary disease

Airway-branch variations associated with higher COPD prevalence

Feb 6, 2018

The internal anatomy of our lungs is surprisingly variable, and some of those variations are associated with a greater risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a new study led by researchers at Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and the Columbia University Irving Medical Center has found.

The study’s first author, Dr. Benjamin Smith, a clinician scientist at the RI-MUCH and assistant professor in McGill’s Department of Medicine, noticed that variations in the large airways of lungs had been reported in old autopsy studies. So he and the other researchers set out to see how common those variations are in the general population, and if they were associated with COPD.

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