BACKGROUND Reported wheeze is the cornerstone of asthma diagnosis. AIMS To determine what parents understand by wheeze. METHODS Two studies were undertaken: (1) Parents of clinic attendees with reported wheeze (n=160) were asked by questionnaire what they understood by "wheeze" and how they knew their child was wheezy. Responses were compared to definitions of wheeze in 12 epidemiology stud...

In-vivo monitoring of patient’s cardiac mechanics via seismocardiogram was recently introduced (demonstrated). Usually, seismocardiogram is recorded using accelerometers placed on patient’s sternum. This study present the ability of a PVDF piezo film transducer to record the mechanical activity of the heart (seismocardiogram and heart sounds) and also of the respiration-related, thorax motion. ...

BACKGROUND Little is known of the language healthcare professionals use to describe cough sounds. We aimed to examine how they describe cough sounds and to assess whether these descriptions suggested they appreciate the basic sound qualities (as assessed by acoustic analysis) and the underlying diagnosis of the patient coughing. METHODS 53 health professionals from two large respiratory terti...

In this paper, we propose a robust classification method for lung sounds contaminated with heart sounds in order to distinguish between healthy subjects and abnormal patients with pulmonary emphysema. We previously developed a classification procedure based on a maximum-likelihood approach by using hidden Markov models (HMMs). However, contaminated heart sounds caused difficulties in achieving ...

Wheezing in acute respiratory infections is a rule rather than exception. A large proportion of children (up to 75%) having pneumonia or severe pneumonia as per WHO definitions have associated wheezing. The current strategies to diagnose and manage wheeze in the community need to be updated, as audible wheeze is present in only less than one third of wheezy children, and can not be relied upon ...

Lower respiratory tract illnesses (LRIs) are the largest cause of mortality among young children worldwide [1], and are associated with altered lung function, immune system development and respiratory disease in adulthood [2, 3]. Several studies have demonstrated associations between wheezing LRIs in early life and exposure to diesel traffic related air pollutants (D-TRAP) [1, 4, 5]. We, along ...

A respiratory survey was conducted in two British towns, one with a high mortality (Caerphilly) and one with a low mortality (Bath) from respiratory disease. A total of 513 men aged 65-74 years were seen. The Caerphilly men had poorer lung function than the Bath men; the overall difference in FEV1 and FVC for men aged 70 and 1.68m tall was 0.16 1 and 0.17 1 respectively. These differences appea...