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Squawks in pneumonia
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  1. R Paciej,
  2. A Vyshedskiy,
  3. D Bana,
  4. R Murphy
  1. Faulkner/Brigham and Women Hospitals, Boston, MA, USA
  1. Correspondence to:
    Dr R Murphy
    1153 Centre St, Suite 4990, Boston, MA 02130, USA; rmurphyfaulknerhospital.org

https://doi.org/10.1136/thorax.2003.014415

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    Squawks are short inspiratory wheezes that have been described in hypersensitivity pneumonitis and other fibrotic disorders. Little attention has been paid to the fact that they also occur in patients with pneumonia. In the course of studying the correlation of automated lung sound analysis with disease states in patients at a community teaching hospital, we noticed that squawks appeared to be more common in patients with pneumonia than we expected. We therefore examined the occurrence of squawks more systematically in 500 subjects who had been examined with a multichannel lung sound analyser (Stethographics Model STG-1602), as previously described.1

    Seventy eight of the subjects in this population had a clinical diagnosis of pneumonia. All participants had been asked to breathe more deeply than normal with their mouths open. Two 20 second samples were taken. The Institutional Review Board of the Faulkner Hospital approved the study. Two experienced observers, blinded to the clinical diagnosis, used playback and waveform displays to identify squawks. They were defined according to the criteria initially described by Earis et al and adopted by CORSA.2,3 All channels from each subject were replayed and the waveforms of …

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