Chest
Original ResearchQuantitative Analysis of Fibroblastic Foci in Usual Interstitial Pneumonia
Section snippets
Study Population
We experienced consecutive 39 patients with interstitial pneumonia associated with CVD and 37 patients with idiopathic interstitial pneumonia who underwent open or thoracoscopic lung biopsy in our hospital between 1990 and 2003. Surgical lung biopsy slides were independently reviewed by two lung pathologists (S.I., N.E.) who were unaware of clinical or physiologic findings. When the classification differed between the pathologists, a consensus opinion on the overall histopathologic pattern was
Clinical Characteristics, Laboratory Findings, Pulmonary Function Testing, and BAL Findings
The clinical characteristics and laboratory findings of the patients with CVD-UIP and IPF/UIP are summarized in Table 1. There were no significant differences in clinical characteristics between CVD-UIP and IPF/UIP, although the proportion of female patients with CVD-UIP tended to be higher than that with IPF/UIP, and pack-years of smoking in IPF/UIP tended to be higher than those in CVD-UIP. In laboratory findings, serum surfactant protein-D levels of IPF/UIP were higher than that of CVD-UIP,
Discussion
The main aim of this study was to develop a more quantitative procedure for scoring the degrees of FF than the semiquantitative methods previously reported. Our scoring method using a CCD camera and analytic software enabled us to accurately measure the %FF, and evaluate the degree of FF as the quantitative %FF scores. Additionally, we found that our quantitative %FF score was an independent prognostic factor in patients with UIP in the Cox proportional hazards regression model. Interestingly,
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