Bronchial Hyperresponsiveness to Methacholine in Children Under 4 Years with Recurrent Bronchitis

The highs and lows of wheezing: A review of the most popular adventitious lung sound

“…9 Cane et al 93 concentration of methacholine that elicits wheeze, or PCwheeze, as a possible substitute for the standard assessment of changes in FEV1. 64 During subsequent years, this parameter was used in several studies of children, 26,[65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78] and adults, [79][80][81][82] but the attraction of PCwheeze as an indicator of airway hyperreactivity has lessened somewhat since some studies showed sensitivity as low as 16% 68 and specificity of only 43%. 77 Nevertheless, subjective assessment by physicians seems to compare favourably with computerized acoustic analysis, detecting wheeze with very high sensitivity, and specificity as long as the proportional wheeze time Tw/Ttot is at least 10%.…”