Defining severe bronchiectasis

Severity assessment has proven useful in many respiratory diseases and is expected to become increasingly important in the management of bronchiectasis patients. Clinical severity scores allow clinicians and researchers to identify low-and high-risk patients, make evidence-based treatment decisions and select the right population for clinical trials. In this chapter, we discuss the importance of severity assessment. A wide variety of patient-related factors are known to have an impact on disease severity in bronchiectasis, and an overview of these factors is provided. Currently, different clinical prediction tools are available for classification of disease severity in bronchiectasis: the BSI, the FACED score (and its derivative, the E-FACED score including exacerbations) and the BACI. Finally, we analyse the differences among the scoring systems, and highlight their advantages and disadvantages.