Diagnostic agreement between bronchoalveolar lavage and transbronchial lung biopsy in patients with suspected pulmonary diseases: A single-center study.
Bronchoalveolar lavage and lung biopsy show only moderate agreement diagnosing malignancy.
Diagnostic agreement between bronchoalveolar lavage and transbronchial lung biopsy in patients with suspected pulmonary diseases: A single-center study.
This study investigates the diagnostic concordance between bronchoalveolar lavage (bronchoalveolar lavage) cytology and the histologic analysis of transbronchial lung biopsy (transbronchial lung biopsy) specimens in patients with suspected pulmonary diseases to highlight the strengths and limitations of these complementary diagnostic tools.
We conducted a comprehensive retrospective cross-sectional analysis on patients suspected of pulmonary diseases who underwent both bronchoalveolar lavage and transbronchial lung biopsy from 2018 to 2022.
biopsy and lavage often disagreed on cancer diagnosis despite moderate overall concordance
Our study included a cohort of 189 patients, comprising 104 individuals with suspected malignancy and 85 with suspected infections.
Conversely, within the infectious cohort, bronchoalveolar lavage identified micro-organisms in only five patients, while transbronchial lung biopsy diagnosed infection in 22 patients, achieving an overall agreement of 77.65% (kappa = 0.29, 95% CI: 0.17-0.41).
Our findings underscore the critical role of bronchoalveolar lavage cytology in the diagnosis of pulmonary carcinoma and infectious processes while also revealing its limitations in detecting interstitial lung diseases.
The transbronchial lung biopsy procedure emerges as an indispensable technique for accurate histopathological evaluation in lung cancer diagnostics.
The integration of bronchoalveolar lavage and transbronchial lung biopsy not only enhances diagnostic yield but also provides a more comprehensive understanding of pulmonary pathologies.