Month April 2015

The static respiratory pressures, Maximal Inspiratory Pressure (MIP or PIMAX) and Maximal Expiratory Pressure (MEP or PEMAX) are a way to non-invasively assess respiratory muscle strength. Respirat…

I was reading James Hansen’s textbook on pulmonary function testing (one of my more interesting reads lately) and in passing he mentioned using the VA/TLC ratio as a way to measure ventilatio…

Recently I reviewed a set of completely irreproducible spirometry results. The patient had made eight attempts and the FVC, FEV1 and Peak Flow were different every time. In particular, there were f…

I was reviewing a spirometry report and noticed something odd about the flow-volume loop, or more specifically the tidal loop, and this got me to thinking about what tidal loops can tell us about t…