Abstract:

Sputum induction is recognized as a safe and non-invasive sampling method for collecting and analyzing airway cells, obtaining airway secretions from the patients with cystic fibrosis. It has been widely used for optimizing the examinations of various respiratory inflammatory diseases diagnosis, as well as for researching the inflammatory process and its mechanisms. Sputum induction has been demonstrated that it can achieve the similar positive rate to bronchoscope examination in tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis. The establishment of a standardized method of sputum induction has improved the quality of sputum sample. High quality sputum samples are helpful to improve the sensitivity of etiological detection of pulmonary TB, thus improving the positive rate of pulmonary TB diagnosis. The authors reviewed the current situation of sputum induction researches, as well as its clinical applications. They also compared the efficiency of different sputum induction methods in clinical applications, including hypertonic saline, lung flutters, physiotherapy sputum sample collection technology, and hypertonic saline plus physiotherapy sputum sample collection technology. The value of sputum induction method with hypertonic saline in etiological diagnosis of TB was in depth discussed in this paper.

Key words: Sputum, Tuberculosis, pulmonary, Diagnosis