This document is a detailed proposal addressing the management of spirometry and other pulmonary function tests in the post-COVID-19 pandemic context in Spain. The introduction discusses how the pandemic has affected the performance of these essential tests and underscores the need for a pragmatic assessment of risks and benefits, given that the absence of pulmonary function studies may lead to significant diagnostic and therapeutic errors.The section on the epidemiological situation in Spain highlights that the WHO no longer considers COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern, reflecting the reduced severity of the disease due to high vaccination coverage and the characteristics of circulating variants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough pulmonary embolism (PE) is a frequent complication in COVID-19, its consequences remain unknown. We performed pulmonary function tests, echocardiography and computed tomography pulmonary angiography and identified blood biomarkers in a cohort of consecutive hospitalized COVID-19 patients with pneumonia to describe and compare medium-term outcomes according to the presence of PE, as well as to explore their potential predictors. A total of 141 patients (56 with PE) were followed up during a median of 6 months.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Asthma-COPD overlap (ACO) is a term that encompasses patients with characteristics of two conditions, smoking asthmatics or COPD patients with asthma-like features such as high bronchodilator response or blood eosinophil count ≥300 cells/μL. The aim of this study was to compare the different phenotypes inside the ACO definition in a real-life population cohort.
Methods: We analyzed patients from the MAJORICA cohort who had a diagnosis of asthma and/or COPD based on current guidelines, laboratory data in 2014 and follow-up until 2015.