Regarding the diagnoses of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and asthma-COPD overlap (ACO), the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA)/Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) joint project and the Japanese Respiratory Society (JRS) have each published diagnostic tools; however, it is necessary to verify that the criteria are consistent with the actual diagnosis. Therefore, we compared the diagnoses obtained for 20 asthma patients with chronic airflow limitation, 11 asthma patients with a smoking history and chronic airflow limitation, 41 ACO patients, and 64 COPD patients. The sensitivity and specificity were 90% and 100% for asthma, 88.5% and 82.1% for ACO, and 79.7% and 91.7% for COPD according to the JRS criteria, when asthma patients with a smoking history are included in ACO.
Using the GINA/GOLD criteria, a high concordance rate for each feature was required for asthma diagnosis, and a good diagnosis was obtained with a low concordance rate for ACO and COPD diagnosis. In the future, more study needs to be done into diagnostic definitions.