Vito Brusasco, Riccardo Pellegrino
European Respiratory Journal 2022 60: 2200317; DOI: 10.1183/13993003.00317-2022
Extract
In 2005, the European Respiratory Journal published a series of American Thoracic Society (ATS)/European Respiratory Society (ERS) consensus documents on the standardisation of pulmonary function testing (PFT), which ended with an article on interpretative strategies [1]. Despite being well received by the scientific community (with over 3500 citations so far), that article generated controversy in a couple of areas and left some questions open due to insufficient evidence available at that time. After more than 10 years, the two societies felt the need to update the whole series, with the main purpose of addressing recent technical advancements. The final document published in the current issue of the European Respiratory Journal [2] is again on interpretative strategies. The difference between the two interpretative documents is that the current one is focused on technical sources of uncertainty, rather than on algorithms for lung function planning and interpretation in the clinical context.
The application of suitable reference equations based on a robust statistical approach is central to pulmonary function testing, but the complexity of lung physiology makes the interpretation of results in individual patients challenging https://bit.ly/3gUpXz5
Footnotes
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Conflict of interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.
- Received February 10, 2022.
- Accepted February 13, 2022.
- Copyright ©The authors 2022. For reproduction rights and permissions contact permissions@ersnet.org
