IL6 and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: Nine lncRNAs were consistently differentially expressed in samples from smokers with COPD as indicated (Figure 1A), and only IL6‐AS1 with high even in fold‐change of expression among differentially expressed lncRNAs (Figure 1B) was significantly upregulated in the subsequent verification between samples from 17 smokers without COPD and 19 smokers with COPD (Figure 1C, Figure S1 and Table S1).