Advair improves survival rates for patients with chronic obstruction pulmonary disorder (COPD), the drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s announced on Tuesday, but the improvement fell just short of statistical significance, meaning the beneficial effect may have been due to chance.

Europe’s biggest drugmaker said preliminary results from a clinical trial involving more than 6,100 patients, known as TORCH, showed a 17 percent relative reduction in mortality over three years for COPD patients given the asthma drug Advair versus those given placebo.

GlaxoSmithKline said there was a 5.2-percent chance that Advair reduced mortality in the TORCH study. A result of 5 percent or less is needed for a finding to be statistically significant.

“The reality is that this gives them a competitive angle against Spiriva,” Max Hermann, an industry analyst at ING Financial Markets said, referring to Advair’s main competitor in COPD from U.S. drugmaker Pfizer Inc and Germany’s Boehringer Ingelheim.

Advair is known to relieve COPD symptoms, but TORCH is the first study to show the drug also helps people live longer.

The World Health Organisation estimates that 600 million people worldwide have COPD.

Advair is licensed as a treatment for COPD in the United States and in Europe, under the name Seretide.

“GSK will be working with regulatory authorities to incorporate these study findings into our prescribing information for Seretide/Advair,” the firm said in a statement.

The study showed Advair also reduced the rate of COPD exacerbations by 25 percent compared with placebo, while adverse events appeared consistent with previous studies of the drug, GSK said.