BACKGROUND The coughs occurring during cough provocation tests are usually counted at the same time when the test is being conducted, i.e., simultaneously. It is unknown whether cough counting from video recording might increase the accuracy of the cough counting. During recent years, cough challenges with hypertonic aerosols have been introduced. They often provoke very frequent coughing which...

INTRODUCTION Reliable characterization of a hypertrophic scar (HTS) is integral to epidemiologic studies designed to identify clinical and genetic risk factors for HTS. The Vancouver Scar Scale (VSS) has been widely used for this purpose; however, no publication has defined what score on this scale corresponds to a clinical diagnosis of HTS. METHODS In a survey of 1000 burn care providers, we...

One of the most important recent advances in the investigation of airway inflammation has been the introduction of sputum induction by inhalation of an aerosol of hypertonic saline, by PIN et al. [1] in 1992, to directly obtain airway secretions in asthma. This method has a number of advantages over invasive methods. Safety and practicality are the most obvious. The method of obtaining induced ...