Felicity Payne from Eastbourne, East Sussex, found herself constantly exhausted and thought she had ashtma
As far as Felicity Payne's GP was concerned, the irritating cough she'd had for months was a sign that she was suffering from asthma.
So the former teacher, who was in her late 50s, was prescribed a steroid inhaler to use twice daily and another drug to dilate her airway as and when she needed it.
But after more than a year of using them as prescribed, Felicity's condition had worsened. She was frequently breathless and struggling to maintain her active lifestyle.
Whereas previously the mother of three, a widow from Eastbourne, East Sussex, had been a keen walker who enjoyed running around after her five grandchildren, now she found herself constantly exhausted.
She was also having numerous chest infections that laid her low for weeks on end.
And there was a reason for that: Felicity, now 62, didn't have asthma at all. In fact, she had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) — a condition for which inhaled steroids aren't just ineffective, they can make it worse.
It would take more than two years of to‑ing and fro-ing between her GP and specialists before anyone would think to run the simple test that gave the correct diagnosis — and new research has found this is not uncommon.
More than a million people in the UK are being treated for COPD, but some experts fear thousands more may be affected who have been incorrectly told they have another complaint, such as asthma.
Indeed, a new study from Imperial College London has found that more than half of COPD patients are mistakenly told they have asthma and wait months, even years, to get a correct diagnosis.
COPD is an umbrella term for progressive lung diseases such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis. It is quite different from asthma, which is an allergic condition triggered by exposure to allergens.
Those affected by COPD struggle to get air in and out of their lungs, due to damage to the air sacs and an inflamed, narrowed airway.
But after more than a year of using a steroid inhaler as prescribed, Felicity's condition had worsened. She was frequently breathless and struggling to maintain her active lifestyle. And there was a reason: Felicity didn't have asthma, she had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
One of the first signs is a cough, which leads to breathlessness and wheezing. That's because over several years the walls of the airway thicken and excess mucus is produced, which worsens symptoms and increases the risk of infection.
Air pollution and genetics have been implicated, but smoking is responsible for 90 per cent of cases. And therein lies a problem.
Experts say there is a common misconception among family doctors that COPD affects only smokers, or those who have quit within the past couple of years.
In fact, a significant proportion — such as Felicity, who quit cigarettes in the Eighties — stopped smoking 20 or 30 years before symptoms emerged. And at least one in 20 has never smoked at all.
'This is a big problem,' says Peter Barnes, a professor of medicine at the National Heart and Lung Institute. 'GPs are very good at diagnosing asthma, but not so good at diagnosing COPD.
'One of the problems is that even ex-smokers can get short of breath, which is a symptom. But when they tell their GP that they don't smoke, the GP is, therefore, much less inclined to consider COPD and much more likely to diagnose asthma.'
Dr Jennifer Quint, a respiratory disease specialist at Imperial College London, says many of her patients quit smoking decades before they were diagnosed.
'COPD is just not on doctors' radar,' she says. 'Yet this illness can literally blow huge holes in your lungs.'
It can be diagnosed with a test that is readily available to all GPs, called spirometry. This uses a hand-held mouthpiece to measure how much air a patient breathes out and how fast they blow it out.
The secret to differentiating it from asthma is getting patients to take a puff on an asthma inhaler to dilate the airway before repeating the test.
In asthma, the drug should reverse the inflammation — so the air flows freely. In COPD, the damage is irreversible, so there will always be greater obstruction.
Professor Barnes, who is also a consultant in respiratory medicine at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, says both current and former smokers — even those who quit decades ago — should be
