Results
A total of thirty patients with a mean age of 60.8±9.3 years were enrolled in the study and 90% (n=27) were male and 10% (n=3) were female participants. On assessing the severity of COPD, there were 3.3%, 33.3%, 50%, and 13.3% of cases with mild, moderate, severe COPD, and very severe COPD, respectively among the study participants. All urine pH values were in the range 4-5-6-5. There were only 10% of patients reported no exacerbation and 90% of them had at least one exacerbation in the last year. Also, there were 16.7% of cases required hospitalization once, and 3.3% of cases required hospitalization twice in the last one-year duration. Only 23.3% of study participants were not taken an antibiotic course in the past year.. Also, only 16.7% of cases did not receive any OCS in the past year whereas 83.3% of cases received at least one short course of OCS in the past one-year duration.
Mean urine concentration of salbutamol concerning total correct steps were shown in Graph 1. The mean concentration of salbutamol was found to be 2.3 µg/ml (n=1), 2.3 µg/ml (n=5), 3.1 µg/ml (n=7), 3.9 µg/ml (n=8), 4.7 µg/ml (n=5), 5.3 µg/ml (n=3), and 5.0 µg/ml (n=1) among cases who performed two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight steps correctly, respectively.