This is probably the last post I will be able to write. I was diagnosed less than two months ago with a very nasty cancer with a poor prognosis. I thought I could power through it but a serious infection with sepsis and a week and a half stay in the hospital has convinced me that it’s time to quit and focus on other things.
Sucks, but that’s life.
There are many pulmonary function topics I would have liked to discuss but time has run out. I will leave you to ponder the two biggest elephants in the room; that of height and that of ethnicity. The relationship between height and FVC, TLC, etc. is inexact and yet nobody seems to think about any alternate anthropomorphic measurements. Sitting height is only marginally better but it is better. Is anybody using it? No. C’mon people, it’s way past time that we found better anthropomorphic correlations for FVC, FEV1, TLC and DLCO.
And what the heck is ethnicity? Where is there a definition for it? Although I applaud the GLI efforts for more universal FVC reference values they included fudge factors for ethnicity. Fudge factors!!??. It’s time that the concept of ethnicity was dropped and better (see above) anthropomorphic correlations were made.
Keep learning. Keep questioning.
Goodbye.
– UPDATE –