The Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) is a non-profit organization started by the

World Health Organization The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level o ...

and the US

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) is the third largest Institute of the National Institutes of Health, located in Bethesda, Maryland, United States. It is tasked with allocating about $3.6 billion in FY 2020 in tax revenue t ...

in 1997 to improve care for

chronic obstructive pulmonary disease Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a type of progressive lung disease characterized by long-term respiratory symptoms and airflow limitation. The main symptoms include shortness of breath and a cough, which may or may not produce ...

(COPD). They have organized the annual awareness day, World COPD Day, every November since 2002. This organization issues recommendations for the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and related medical conditions. GOLD issued its first formal recommendations in 2001. Their approach departed from previous medical guidelines in two significant respects: * Previous recommendations were usually written by groups of experts, usually from a single medical specialty, partly on the basis of their own experiences. They were the first to evaluate the

levels of evidence A hierarchy of evidence (or levels of evidence) is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from scientific research. There is broad agreement on the relative strength of large-scale, epidemiological studies. More than ...

that supported their recommendations. GOLD's approach to

evidence-based medicine Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients". The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician, the values of t ...

was more rigorous than the previous COPD recommendations, but other organizations, including the

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department of Health and Social Care in England that publishes guidelines in four areas: * the use of health technologies withi ...

, use more complex systems. * GOLD's recommendations are also updated more frequently than was typical in the past. This allows the recommendations to include newer evidence.

Adoption

The GOLD grading system for classifying the severity of COPD is widely used worldwide.

References

{{Medical-organization-stub World Health Organization Lung disease organizations