Once again we’ve had some staff turnover. Rightly or wrongly, the pattern we follow in staffing the lab is to hire people with a science degree and then train them ourselves. Our hires are usually interested in a career in medicine but often haven’t decided what specifically interests them. We look for individuals with people skills on top of their education and ask for a minimum of a year’s commitment with the requirement that they get their CPFT certification by the end of the year. Sometimes our staff only stays a year, sometimes a couple years, and most of the time when they leave they go back to college for a more advanced degree and become nurses or physician assistants and occasionally even physicians (a couple of our pulmonary fellows were former PFT lab alumni).

The ATS/ERS standard for spirometry recommends reporting the highest FEV1 and the highest FVC even when they come from different tests. Our lab software allows us to do this, but only with some annoying limitations. One of the bigger limitations has to do with how expiratory time is reported. In particular, expiratory time is lumped in with a number of other values like Peak Flow (PEF) and FEF25-75. As importantly, the flow-volume loop and volume-time curve can only come from a single effort.

One of the more significant changes that appeared in the 2017 ERS/ATS DLCO standards was the requirement that rapid-response gas analyzer (RGA) systems calculate VA using a mass balance approach. This is actually more straightforward than it sounds but it does raise several issues that weren’t fully addressed in the 2017 standards. Up until this time VA has been calculated from the inspired volume and by the amount of dilution of the tracer gas in the exhaled alveolar sample. Specifically:

The new ERS/ATS standards for DLCO testing were published in the January issue of the European Respiratory Journal. The article was published as open access and can be downloaded from the ERJ website. The biggest difference between the new standards and those from 2005 is that they are now primarily oriented towards Rapid-response Gas Analyzers (RGA). The authors explicitly state that the new standards do not make older systems that use discrete alveolar sampling and slower gas analyzers obsolete, but many of the new suggestions and requirements for labs and manufacturers require systems with a RGA.

It’s a tradition to come up with New Year’s resolution in order to improve ourselves. How about some resolutions to improve our labs? 1. Review and update the procedure manual When was the last time you reviewed your procedure manual? Procedure manuals should be reviewed by the lab manager and medical director annually. It’s time to re-read the ATS/ERS guidelines and then review and update your procedure manual. Both your old staff and your new staff need to know what to do and how to do it. Your procedure manual is also going to be the first thing that anybody looks at if your lab is ever inspected.

I’ve been reviewing the literature on PFT interpretation lately and in doing so I ran across one of the issues that’s bothered me for a while. Specifically, my lab has been tasked with following the 2005 ATS/ERS guidelines for interpretation and using this algorithm these results: Observed: %Predicted: LLN: Predicted: FVC: 2.83 120% 1.76 2.36 FEV1: 1.77 100% 1.26 1.76 FEV1/FVC: 63 84% 65 75 would be read as mild airway obstruction.

We’ve all run across the Fick equation for cardiac output at one time or another. There are very limited circumstances when we’d ever get to use it but at the same time it’s one of those simple but incredibly profound equations that’s also a foundation of pulmonary physiology. The Fick equation is: where: VO2 = oxygen uptake CvO2 = mixed venous oxygen content CaO2 = arterial oxygen content And what it describes is:

I was recently contacted by the manager of a lab that was having problems with their N2 washout lung volumes. Specifically, their N2 washout lung volumes (FRC in particular) were coming out low and everyone being tested on the system looked like they had restriction. The system has been checked by the manufacturer’s service techs several times and they’d replaced the tubing, the O2 tank and a number of parts. Service first asked them to wait between tests and then not to bother. Most lately they’ve been asked to calibrate the system before each test. Despite all this, their system continues to under-estimate lung volumes.

Cigarette smoking raises the probability that an individual will get lung cancer, chronic bronchitis and/or emphysema (among many other things). Nicotine is addictive and smokers often need significant motivation in order to quit. Lung age is a tool that was designed to give smokers an additional incentive to do this. The concept is fairly simple and that is by reformulating an FEV1 reference equation it is possible to take an individual’s actual FEV1 and estimate the age of their lungs (ELA). Because cigarette smoking can cause airway obstruction it tends to mimic premature lung aging which means that when a smoker’s FEV1 is used to calculate an ELA it can be significantly greater than their real or chronological lung age (CLA).

Recently I’ve been trying to help somebody whose spirometry results changed drastically depending on where their tests were performed. When their spirometry was performed on an office spirometer their FVC was less than 60% of predicted and when they were performed in a PFT lab on a multi-purpose test system their FVC was closer to 90% of predicted. Part of the reason for this was that different predicted equations are being used in each location but even so there was about a 1.5 liter difference in FVC.