Abstract
Guys and St Thomas' NHS Foundation trust (GSTT) is a tertiary hospital based in London, UK, offering specialist allergy and asthma clinics.
In July 2010, GSTT switched from using histamine to mannitol for performing bronchial challenge testing (BCT). BCT is an essential diagnostic investigation for identifying/excluding asthma and monitoring responses to treatment regiimes.
We performed an audit of the new service, using mannitol between July 2010 and February 2011. We looked at patient demographics, (age, sex, baseline lung function), test outcomes (i.e. positive, negative, reasons for terminating test, fall in FEV1), sources of referral and clinical rweasons for referral to our laboratory.
Table 1 shows patient demographics and baseline lung function. 60 patients were referred to the service (28M, 32F). The mean age was 40.2 yrs.
Table 1. Patient demographics
Table 2 shows source of referral and reason for referral.
Table 2. Source of referral
- © 2011 ERS
