Richard Johnston

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 …

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 ann…

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. T…

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 websi…

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 tim…

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 th…

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…

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…

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 signifi…

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 spirome…