The umbrella term COPD covers many endotypes having different underlying mechanisms and, likely, encompasses different diseases, each characterized by clinical and pathological heterogeneity, but also by features that overlap.
Thus, there is a pressing need for COPD care to move from the current "one-size-fits-all" approach to a precision medicine approach that takes into account individual patient variability in genes, environment and lifestyle.
It is common opinion that through both a better understanding of phenotypic groups and their characterization, it may be possible to develop simple allocation criteria to enable clinicians to assign individual patients to specific groups
