Category pftblog

After a couple years of waiting for the new methacholine standards to be released “any day now”, they were finally published in this month’s issue of the European Respiratory Journal. The standard …

Inspiratory and expiratory flow rates are a function of driving pressure (i.e. the pressure difference between the alveoli and the atmosphere) and airway resistance. For this reason it would seem t…

I was contacted recently by an individual with some questions about the pulmonary function testing needed for a Social Security Disability evaluation. With a small amount of research I was able to …

About a month or so ago I was corresponding with the manager of a small PFT lab and in response to one of their questions I had mentioned that there were no CPT codes for MIP/MEP. They responded wi…

Okay, this may be wrong but at the moment I’m can’t seem to find a reason why it should be. A report like this came across my desk a couple of days ago. Observed: %Predicted: Post-BD: %Predicted: %…

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had an unusual number of patients with expiratory plateaus on their flow-volume loops. Expiratory plateaus are usually considered to be a sign of an intrathoracic…

I had finished reviewing a pre- and post-BD spirometry report yesterday and was about to toss it on my out pile when I noticed something a bit odd about the post-BD results. I pulled it back and sp…

Recently I was reviewing a report that included helium dilution lung volumes. What caught my eye was that the TLC and the FRC didn’t particularly fit in with the results from the other tests the pa…

The European Respiratory Society has just published the first standards for DLNO testing. This is a signal that DLNO is moving from a research setting into routine clinical testing. Although it is …

Last week I ran across a couple errors in some DLCO tests that I don’t remember seeing before, or at least not as distinctly as they appeared this time. If I hadn’t been looking carefully I could h…