LEADING ARTICLE
Cystic fibrosis
Hypertonic saline inhalation in cystic fibrosis—salt in the wound, or sweet success?
Cystic Fibrosis/Respiratory Unit, Children’s Hospital for Wales, Cardiff, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr I Doull
Cystic Fibrosis/Respiratory Unit, Children’s Hospital for Wales, Cardiff CF14 4XW, UK; doullij@cf.ac.uk
Accepted 31 October 2006
A large-scale study has put hypertonic saline back in the spotlight
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Among the greatest challenges facing the cystic fibrosis community at present is the apparently simple task of determining whether a treatment is beneficial or not. Most of the traditional outcome measures may no longer be useful—the outlook for cystic fibrosis has improved so dramatically that using survival is impractical; clinical scoring systems such as the Shwachman-Kulczycki score are too subjective and insensitive,1 and many children have no respiratory symptoms with pulmonary function within the normal range. The vast majority of patients with cystic fibrosis succumb to terminal respiratory failure, and pulmonary function is strongly predictive of survival.2 Consequently attention has concentrated on respiratory outcomes, most notably pulmonary function and pulmonary exacerbations. There is however considerable inherent variability in measurements of pulmonary function in cystic fibrosis. The standard measure of pulmonary function is the forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1), but a change of 10% can be within
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Arch. Dis. Child. 2007 92: e3.[Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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