Recently a reader asked me a question about the FVC/DLCO ratio. To be honest I’d never heard of this ratio before which got me intrigued so I spent some time researching it. What I found leav…
I was reviewing a spirometry report last week and when I went to compare the results with the patient’s last visit I noticed that the FVC and FEV1 hadn’t changed significantly. However,…
A couple of days ago my medical director and I had a short discussion about teaching pulmonary fellows to read PFTs and agreed that in order to be good at interpreting PFTs it isn’t the basic…
I like to think my lab is better than most but every so often something comes along that makes me realize I’m probably only fooling my self. Earlier this week I was reviewing the DLCO test da…
Most of the COPD patients that are seen in my lab tend to have little change in their FEV1 from visit to visit but their FVC often changes significantly. A change in FVC is usually related to how l…
We recently performed a 6-minute walk test with helium-oxygen (heliox) for a patient of one of the physicians that specializes in airway stenting. His reasons for the test weren’t particularl…
While reading a recently published article I found they had performed response to hypoxia and hyperoxia testing as part of the study. At one time or another in the past I’ve read about respon…
Hypoventilation is defined as ventilation below that which is needed to maintain adequate gas exchange. It can be a feature in lung diseases as diverse as chronic bronchitis and pulmonary fibrosis …
During this last week I was contacted by two different individuals who were asking for help in understanding their PFT results. In both cases they had a markedly elevated TLC and the interpretation…
