Category pftblog

My PFT Lab has recently been asked by several doctor’s offices and clinics to advise them on the purchase of an office spirometry system. I am not a fan of office spirometry because I think t…

Patients that have problems with oxygenation at sea level are going to have even more problems at higher elevations where the barometric pressure and oxygen partial pressure are lower. During comme…

Although the authors of the Global Lung Function Initiative (GLFI) study acknowledge the effect of height on their reference equations the range and distribution of heights in its study populations…

I was reviewing a cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET) recently. The test was part of a pre-op workup for a patient with lung cancer who also had a diagnosis of COPD. I had looked at the spirometry…

The Global Lung Function Initiative (GLFI) was established by the European Respiratory Society in 2008 with the goal of establishing a truly worldwide set of reference equations for spirometry. Its…

It’s always fascinating how a simple problem can blossom into something much more complicated. Ninety-five percent of the time when we need to report post test results for spirometry they are…

Over forty years ago when I started to learn about pulmonary function testing I was taught about the nuts and bolts of the tests, not where the tests came from or how they came into existence. Spir…

I’ve had some concerns for a while now about how the CO and CH4 concentrations are being calculated from the DLCO analyzer calibration zero offsets and gains on our test systems. For this rea…

Expiratory flow limitation exists when increasing expiratory effort fails to increase the expiratory flow rate. This can been seen when a patient exhales along the same flow-volume curve during qui…