Determining whether a subject has a ventilatory limitation to exercise used to be fairly simple since it was based solely on the maximum minute ventilation (Ve) as a percent of predicted. There has…

We have a number of patients who have spirometry and DLCO testing performed at regular intervals. I’ve noticed that every so often DLCO results change significantly without a change in spirom…

For a variety of reasons my wife recently had a full panel of PFTs (spiro+BD, lung volumes, DLCO) at a different hospital than the one I work at. I went with her and was pleased to see the technici…

Airway hyper-responsiveness is a primary feature of asthma. There are a number of bronchial challenge tests designed to evoke and measure this factor, the most common of which require the inhalatio…

Spirometry is the most commonly performed (and mis-performed) pulmonary function test around the world. The apparent simplicity of spirometry is misleading since there are numerous subtleties that …

Recently a rather eminent reader commented on an older blog entry. He finished his comment with a paragraph on another topic, however. Specifically: By the way, it is also high time that we scuttle…

There has been a fair amount of confusion about PFT lab staff licensure requirements. This information is not available on the AARC website, nor on any of the AARC state society websites. A month o…

Outside the pulmonary lab there is this notion that spirometry is supposed to be so easy that anyone can do it. You just tell the patient to take a deep breath in and blow out fast and to keep blow…

When Tiffeneau described the FEV1 in 1947 and Gaensler the timed FVC and FEV1/FVC ratio in 1950 this opened up an entirely new territory for pulmonary investigators to explore. Numerous new measure…

I’ve discussed the issue of inserting a predicted FVC into the predicted lung volumes several times now. At the risk of beating this issue to death I’d like to put to rest the notion th…