Rehabilitation in COPD patients: evergreen in Pneumology and beyond.

Several studies have shown so far that pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) has a beneficial effect on symptoms and on Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) in stable COPD patients.Nowadays major effort should be addressed to implement optimal rehabilitation regimens focused on individual needs, clarifying the effects of different PR components, exercise modalities and feasible settings. In this issue of the journal the first review article of a new series “Novelties in Pulmonary Rehabilitation” dealing with all these innovative aspects associated to the rehabilitation of COPD patients is invited (see also table 1). As the guest editors of these review articles we have chosen 5 main topics of interest to assure readers of some of the hot topics and/or unanswered questions on the clinical ground.