Chest
Clinical Investigations: Infection: ArticlesClinical, Pathophysiologic, and Microbiologic Characterization of Bronchiectasis in an Aging Cohort
Section snippets
Methods
A retrospective review of patients seen at the University of Texas Health Center at Tyler from 1985 to 1993 with a diagnosis of bronchiectasis was carried out. In each case, the diagnosis had been made by the patient's primary physician on the basis of an assessment of the overall clinical picture. Because of the retrospective nature of this report, it was not possible to determine what diagnostic criteria were being used for the original diagnosis by the primary physician.
The charts were
Results
A total of 363 patients with a diagnosis of bronchiectasis were found by a search of the medical records database. In 97% of patients, we were able to review the charts. The diagnosis was incorrect due to miscoding or insufficient clinical data were available for review in 40 (8%) of the patients. In 200 (55%) of the patients, the diagnosis was unproved. The remaining 123 patients form the basis for this report.
In 69 (56%) of the patients, the clinical diagnosis was confirmed on the basis of
Discussion
Bronchiectasis as a primary pulmonary diagnosis seems to be uncommon, judging by a review of current literature,3 although we are not aware of any incidence or prevalence data for bronchiectasis for the United States. The reason for the apparent underdiagnosis of this debilitating lung disease may reside in the fact that few textbooks in pulmonary medicine portray bronchiectasis as a significant and/or common lung problem. This may be partly due to the lack of recent descriptive data in
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