The 2019 ATS/ERS Spirometry Standards were recently released. The standards are open-access and can be downloaded without charge from the October 15 th issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Supplements are available from the same web page. The 2019 Spirometry Standards have been extensively re-organized with numerous updates. Notably, a number of sections that were previously discussed in the 2005 General Considerations for Lung Function Testing have been updated and included in the 2019 Spirometry Standards. Also notably, a number of stand-alone spirometry tests, including the Flow-Volume Loop, PEF and MVV are not included in the 2019 Standards.

The ATS has released its first standard for reporting pulmonary function results. This report is in the December 1, 2017 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. At the present time however, despite its importance it is not an open access article and you must either be a member of the ATS or pay a fee ($25) in order to access it. Hopefully, it will soon be included with the other open access ATS/ERS standards .

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 is an open access article and can be downloaded by anyone. The length of time taken to develop the standard was acknowledged and although active ATS participation was withdrawn because the original timeline was not met, for the most part the original ATS participants continued with the task group and the standard has been officially endorsed by the ATS.

The new ERS/ATS standards for DLCO testing were published in the January issue of the European Respiratory Journal. The article was published as open access and can be downloaded from the ERJ website. The biggest difference between the new standards and those from 2005 is that they are now primarily oriented towards Rapid-response Gas Analyzers (RGA). The authors explicitly state that the new standards do not make older systems that use discrete alveolar sampling and slower gas analyzers obsolete, but many of the new suggestions and requirements for labs and manufacturers require systems with a RGA.