Category pftblog

One of the things that I enjoy most about reviewing cardiopulmonary exercise tests is that I always have to reach back into the basics of physiology in order to get a sense of what the results are …

For the last several months I’ve noticed what appears to be a greater than normal number of patient test results where the VA volume from the DLCO test was greater than the TLC. This is not i…

In my last blog on personal spirometers I mentioned that one of the university projects has developed software that assesses spirometry results for ATS-ERS standard including cough, glottal closure…

Peak flow meters, both mechanical and electronic, have been available to asthma patients for years. A number of inexpensive spirometers that meet ATS-ERS standards are now available for little as $…

When we went through our hardware and software upgrade last August, one of the changes we made was to stop reporting the FEF25%-75% (AKA MMEF, MMFR, MMF). The pulmonary physicians had long since st…

A report of a patient’s complete set of PFTS came across my desk yesterday. There were a lot of inconsistencies in the report and I ended up looking at the raw data for every single test. Whe…

Patients are advised not to smoke prior to DLCO testing, primarily because it increases carboxyhemoglobin. The effect of COHb on DLCO has been well studied, but COHb is not often measured before DL…

I was recently contacted by a physician looking for an illustration or diagram to help make gas exchange and DLCO more understandable. We’ve all seen the diagram of the alveoli with a capilla…

This is not something I have any real influence over because the tests ordered on a patient’s first visit to the PFT lab are going to be determined by the ordering patterns of the referring p…

I’ve had a bug lately about lung volumes and I guess that today is no different. A report with some odd lung volume results came across my desk and I’ve spent some time trying to figure…