Grace Anne Koppel Defies COPD Odds, Advocates for Disease Awareness

Grace Anne Koppel was told she had three to five years to live. That was 1991. It is now 2026, and she is still here, still breathing, still fighting—though the fight has become harder each year.

She was diagnosed with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in 2001, but the road to that diagnosis was a study in medical failure. A year earlier, she had gone to her family doctor complaining of shortness of breath so severe she could not walk half a block without stopping to catch her breath. The doctor performed what he called a complete physical, ordered no breathing test, and told her to lose ten pounds. She would feel like a new woman, he said. A month later, on vacation with her husband Ted—the longtime ABC News Nightline anchor—and their children, she collapsed. She was wheezing so badly she could not sleep. When they returned home and she finally saw a pulmonologist, the first test revealed the truth: she had lost 72 percent of her lung capacity. She was very severely ill.

The diagnosis came with a death sentence wrapped in clinical language. Doctors told her to prepare for the end of her life. She chose instead to prepare for living. She threw herself into pulmonary rehabilitation, took the medications prescribed to her, and found good doctors who treated her aggressively with bronchodilators, oral steroids, and pulmonary rehab—a regimen that, she says, changed her life. Twenty-five years later, she hovers around 50 percent of predicted lung function, a recovery that defies the odds and her own doctors' expectations.

But COPD is a progressive disease, and the years have taken their toll. For the last three years, she has needed supplemental oxygen whenever she stands or moves. She carries batteries and worries about power failures. She plans her days around oxygen availability—a dentist appointment, a meeting with friends, all require calculation. Breathlessness, she explains, is the disease's cruelest feature. It is not merely physical. It is existential. When you cannot breathe, you cannot hope. When you cannot move without oxygen, you become isolated. People sometimes despise you for it.

What drives Koppel's public advocacy now is a misconception she encounters constantly: the belief that COPD is a smoker's disease, a consequence of personal choice. She has never smoked. Neither have 25 to 40 percent of people living with COPD. The disease is born from environmental pollution, occupational exposure, secondhand smoke, and the air itself. Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that over 380 million people have COPD, making it the world's fourth leading cause of death. Yet it remains, in the WHO's phrase, a silent killer—overlooked, underfunded, stigmatized.

In response, Koppel and her husband established the Dorney-Koppel Foundation in 1999. About thirteen to fourteen years ago, after witnessing the transformative power of pulmonary rehabilitation in her own recovery, she began asking why such care was not available in rural America, where COPD prevalence is highest. The foundation now operates eleven clinics across the country, beginning in West Virginia. She has found purpose in watching people take control of their own lives, in spreading the message that COPD is not a death sentence but a life sentence—one that can be lived with dignity, with treatment, with hope.

The disease itself offers little room for optimism. There is no magic bullet, no single cure. Treatment is multimodal and deeply personal. Patients must exercise, eat well, take their medications precisely as prescribed, and remain vigilant against the progressive nature of the disease. New biologics show promise—AstraZeneca's tozorakimab, for instance, has demonstrated reductions in moderate-to-severe exacerbations in Phase III trials—but these treatments remain in development, awaiting market approval and expanded research funding that Koppel believes is long overdue.

Few public figures have stepped forward to tell their COPD stories. The stigma is too great, the association with smoking too entrenched. But Koppel, now in her ninth decade, continues to speak. She speaks because she lived when she was supposed to die. She speaks because millions of others are living with this disease in silence, without access to the care that saved her life. She speaks because breath is life, and life, she has learned, is worth fighting for.