SAN FRANCISCO — It may be time to move beyond relying largely on spirometry to distinguish between healthy and abnormal lung function in diverse populations.
That conclusion comes from investigators who looked at patients with ostensibly normal spirometry values in a large population-based study and found that using standard equations to adjust for racial differences in lung-function measures appeared to miss emphysema in a significant proportion of Black patients.
"Our traditional measures of lung health based on spirometry may be underrecognizing impaired respiratory health in Black adults, and particularly Black men," said lead author Gabrielle Liu, MD, a fellow in the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
"CT imaging may be useful in the evaluation of those with suspected impaired respiratory health and normal spirometry," she said in an oral abstract session at the American Thoracic Society International Conference 2022.
Liu and colleagues studied the association between self-identified race and visually identified emphysema among 2674 participants in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study. The patients had CT scans at a mean age of 50, and spirometry at a mean age of 55.
Racial Differences
The investigators found that among men with forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV
