A month or two ago in the AARC Diagnostics forum several members noted that their labs had acquired Impulse Oscillometry systems a number of years ago but that their physicians had since stopped or…

A couple of days ago I was reviewing (triaging, actually) the spirometry portion of a full panel of PFTs performed with pretty terrible test quality and was trying to decide if the technician respo…

A friend recently sent me the links to several YouTube videos on pulmonary function testing. I’ve spent some time off and on over the last year looking at YouTube videos and in particular I’ve been…

The use of Z scores to report PFT results, both clinically and for research is occurring more and more frequently. Both the Z score and the Lower Limit of Normal (LLN) come from the same roots and …

A couple weeks ago I was asked whether it was safe for a patient with an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) to have pulmonary function testing. My first thought was that it was probably unsafe but aft…

The 2005 ATS/ERS standards for assessing post-bronchodilator changes in FVC and FEV1 have been criticized numerous times. A recent article in the May issue of Chest (Quanjer et al) has taken it to …

A very strange spirometry report came across my desk a couple of days ago. Observed: Predicted: %Predicted: FVC: 3.07 0 29767 FEV1: 2.15 0 37586 FEV1/FVC: 70 71 101% My first thought was that some …

Last week I was reviewing the exercise test results from a patient that appeared to have a relatively straightforward cardiovascular limitation when I noticed the patient also had severe anemia (Hg…

I’ve mentioned before that my lab’s database goes back to 1990, so we now have 27 years of test results available for trending. At least a couple times a week we have a patient who was last seen 10…

Inspiration and expiration usually take different lengths of time, with inspiration almost always being shorter than exhalation. This is due to both to the physiology of breathing and to the pathop…