Category pftblog

One of the overlooked parts of teaching pulmonary function interpretation is developing an appreciation for the number and variety of errors that the equipment, patients and technicians can produce…

The thyroid gland is located across the front of the upper airway a short distance below the larynx. An enlarged thyroid gland is known as a goiter. The most common worldwide cause of goiter is an …

The current ATS/ERS standards for a positive bronchodilator response are an increase in FEV1 or FVC of ≥ 12% and ≥ 200 ml. These standards are largely based on the ability to detect a change that i…

I was reviewing spirometry reports and noticed several patients in a row with an early termination of exhalation that was not reflected in the reported expiratory time. This is far from the first t…

When assessing the response to bronchodilators the change in FEV1 is used far more frequently than any other spirometry result. Other values such as inspiratory capacity (IC) and peak inspiratory f…

A while back one of our technicians brought a helium dilution FRC graph to my attention and wanted to know if it showed a system leak. At that time my response was that it definitely wasn’t a…

My hospital’s Oncology division treats a number of patients with lymphoma and leukemia. It also has an active bone-marrow transplant program and for all of these patients diffusing capacity m…

I was reviewing reports today when I ran across one with some glaring errors. There were several things that immediately told me that the reported plethysmographic lung volumes were way off; the VA…

I’d spent some time researching single-breath tests a while back and of course ran across the Fowler method for measuring anatomic dead space. It’s a relatively simple test but assessin…

I’ve been planning on putting together a tutorial on characterizing and interpreting the contours of flow-volume loops so I’ve been accumulating flow-volume loops that are examples of d…