Viinanen A, Lassenius MI, Toppila I, et al. - Researchers examined patients with COPD in Finland with the aim to delineate healthcare resource utilization (HCRU) and HCRU-associated costs in these patients, according to disease severity and blood eosinophil count (BEC). From the specialist care hospital register, they extracted data from the first hospital visit with a COPD diagnosis (index date) from January 1, 2004, until December 31, 2015, or death for this non-interventional, retrospective registry study. They performed categorization of patients (aged > 18 years with ≥ 1 report of postbronchodilation forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1)/forced vital capacity (FVC) ratio < 0.7) as having non-severe or severe COPD (FEV1 > 50% or ≤ 50% of reference, respectively). They classified patients who were initially non-severe but progressed to severe as having progressing COPD and patients without spirometry registry data as having clinically verified COPD. Nine thousand forty-two patients with COPD were identified; of these, 340 were non-severe, 326 progressing, 394 severe, and 7,982 clinically verified. During follow-up, all-cause mortality of 46% was observed. Relative to non-severe COPD, severe COPD was associated with more COPD-related HCRU and higher mortality. Higher overall HCRU but improved survival was reported for patients with BEC ≥ 300 cells/μL compared with those with BEC < 300 cells/μL. Overall COPD severity categories were similar regarding direct costs, 3300–3900€/patient-year, although higher COPD-related costs were evident for patients with severe vs non-severe COPD.