Effect of Long-Term Oxygen Therapy on Reducing Rehospitalization of Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Introduction: The aim of this work is to evaluate whether the addition of home oxygen therapy (HOT) would reduce readmission in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. Methods: PubMed, ScopeMed, Cochrane, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases were searched. The search strategy used the following keywords “chronic obstructive pulmonary disease”, the intervention “long-term oxygen therapy”, and the outcome “readmission” combined with the AND operator. The Newcastle–Ottawa Scale and Jadad Scale were used for assessing the quality of cohort studies and clinical trials, respectively. A random-effects model was employed in this study after calculating the standard errors by 95% confidence intervals. The I2 statistic and Cochran’s Q-test were used to measure heterogeneity. To address heterogeneity, subgroup analyses were carried out according to the length of LTOT, which was classified as “over 8 months” and “under 8 months”. Results: Seven studies were included in the analysis. In the pooled analysis, the RR [CI95%, p value], heterogeneity criteria for readmission reduced by 1.542 [1.284–1.851, < 0.001], I2 = 60%, and 1.693 [1.645–1.744, < 0.001], I2 = 60% for patients with a length of LTOT treatment under and above 8 months, respectively. A sensitivity analysis was conducted by systematically omitting each study, and it showed no influential studies. Egger’s test indicated no publication bias (p = 0.64). Conclusions: Based on our results in this systematic review, long-tern oxygen therapy (LTOT) at home was associated with a significantly lower risk ratio of hospital readmission. However, the sample sizes in the studies necessitate larger RCTs to evaluate the effect of LTOT on readmission in COPD patients.