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. 2023 Mar 31;23:106. doi: 10.1186/s12890-023-02364-0

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 1 — Sputum and serum hBD-2 levels in COPD exacerbators, non-exacerbators, and controls at baseline. (A–B) hBD-2 levels in the sputum (A) and serum (B) in patients and controls measured by ELISA. (C) The hBD-2 levels of patients who never experienced exacerbation were compared with those of patients who experienced exacerbation at least once. (D) The sputum hBD-2 levels of patients without any exacerbation were compared to those of controls. (E) Patients were categorized into four subgroups according to the frequency of exacerbations. The sputum hBD-2 levels were compared between subgroups (ex-high, > 2 per year; high, 1.5–2 per year; medium, 1–1.5 per year; and low, < 1 per year). (F) According to a cutoff level (1000 pg/mL), patients were grouped into two subsets: the higher subset (> 1000 pg/mL) and the lower subset (< 1000 pg/mL). The proportion of patients experiencing an exacerbation within the following 12 months was calculated. Statistical methods: Kruskal-Wallis (A, B, D, and E); Wilcoxon (C); and chi-square test (F) (for more details about Fig. 1, see Additional file 1: Table S5)