PIM3 and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: Matsuse et al. (1995), Shim (2001) and Kim et al. (2005) did not find a significant association between PiM1, PiM2 or PiM3 alleles and COPD, whereas Kwok et al. (2004) came across a significant increase in PiM1M3, PiM2M3 phenotypes and Gupta et al. (2005) reported a significant increase for the PiM3 allele in COPD patients.