Volume 6, No 1, January 2016

Spirometry Along With Reversibility-Test In Clinical Practice: How Often it Helps Us To Readjust the Diagnosis Between Obstructive-Airway-Diseases?

MA GafurFazle Elahi NuraniMahmuda Quamrun Naher

DOI : https://doi.org/10.64203/nemj/NDGE1197

By MA Gafur Fazle Elahi Nurani Mahmuda Quamrun Naher
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Md. Abdul Gafur1, Fazle Elahi Nurani2, Mahmuda Quamrun Naher3
1. Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, North East Medical College Hospital, Sylhet
2. Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, North East Medical College Hospital, Sylhet
3. Associate Professor, Department of Physiology, North East Medical College Hospital, Sylhet
Abstract
In any health-care-setting throughout the world, irrespective of age or sex or economic status, daily a good number of patients seek medical help for their sufferings from a variety of obstructive airway diseases. In adults, differentiating bronchial-asthma from chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease can be difficult but is important, because of the marked differences in treatment, disease progression, and outcomes between the two conditions. Unfortunately, in a third-world-society like ours, most of the cases of ‘obstructive airway diseases are diagnosed on clinical grounds, leaving much chances to be improperly labelled as Asthma or COPD. This can result in management falling short of the optimum, ultimately causing chronic ill-health & unnecessary financial burden (from repeated visits or admissions) on part of the unlucky patient. The major purpose of our study was to find out how important it is to implement Spirometry including reversibility-test, to properly label individual cases as bronchial-asthma or chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease. During the year of 2015, Fifty adult patients with a diagnosis of Asthma or COPD, attending the office of a respiratory medicine specialist, were re-evaluated, for proper management. Female gender & Younger age were found to be significantly related with the diagnosis of Asthma, while present or past habit of Smoking was found to be significantly related with the diagnosis of COPD. It was also revealed that many of the study subjects had been improperly labelled as Asthma (32% versus 12%), when they were actually suffering from COPD (68% versus 86%), while 2% of them were not at all patients of obstructive-airway-diseases.
Key Words: Spirometry, Asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, reversibility test.

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By MA Gafur
Associate Professor (CC), Department of Medicine, North East Medical College, Sylhet.
By Fazle Elahi Nurani
Professor (CC), Department of Medicine, North East Medical College Hospital, Sylhet
By Mahmuda Quamrun Naher
Professor, Department of Physiology, North East Medical College, Sylhet
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