Raising the awareness: projecting the future burden of COPD with the BOLD model.

N ot so long ago, cost-of-illness studies were criticised for mainly estimating the annual costs of a disease in retrospect, without paying attention to trends in costs and the return on the investments in terms of health benefits. From the time when we began developing models that can simulate the future burden and costs of a disease, we recognised the importance of cost-of-illness studies for providing insight into future healthcare needs and planning purposes. Providing this insight is one of the goals of the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) project.