Inga-Cecilie Soerheim and her colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the University of Bergen in Norway studied 954 patients with COPD and 955 participants unaffected by the disease. Although the researchers found no overall differences between the genders when it came to the severity of COPD or lung function (in this case, measured by the volume of air a person could exhale in one second), they did find that affected women tended to be younger and had smoked less than men.In both groups, the team found that women suffered from a more severe form of the disease and also had a more marked reduction in lung function than men.