Abstract

Nowadays, bronchoalveolar lavage is used to identify interstitial lung disease. The clinical utility of BAL was constrained by high-resolution CT. By following the recommendations of the American Thoracic Society, this study improved the BAL technique and employed a combination of clinical evaluation and HRCT to determine the cause of ILD. Method: In this case, we have done the prospective continuous study at the Department of Pulmonology, Shadan Institute of Medical Sciences, Hyderabad, Telangana, India between May 2021 to April 2022. After receiving a detailed description of the procedure and the aims of the study, all patients who participated in the trial gave their informed consent. All data collecting procedures were strictly adhered. Result: We tweaked the BAL procedure per ATS's recommendations. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, connective tissue disorder, sarcoidosis, pneumoconiosis, acute respiratory distress syndrome, eosinophilic lung disease, lymph node carcinoma, aspiration bronchiolitis, and pulmonary histocytosis were all among the diagnoses for the sixty patients studied. Statistically, there was a large difference in the total number of observed differences between ILDs. We classified the different ILDs according to the ATS criteria. Conclusion: The inclusion of BAL to clinical and HRCT data improved diagnostic accuracy and led to better management of ILDs by integrating information about the illness's acute vs chronic character and the cause of acute exacerbation.

Description