Wednesday’s Morning Report featured first year Emily Olson (@EmilyOlsonMD) leading a discussion of cavitary lung disease. Let’s review some of her learning points together!
First off, how much better of a mnemonic can you get for cavitary lung diseases than “CAVITY”?
It’s always helpful to look at previous chest imaging, and this is especially true in cavitary lung diseases! An important early diagnostic branch point is chronicity of process (12 weeks as the cutoff for a chronic process)
Histoplasmosis is one differential consideration for subacute/chronic cavitary lung disease which we commonly test for non-invasively.
We learned that the performance characteristics of testing depends on stage of disease.
Thanks for leading a great discussion, Emily!
Sources cited
- Chest. 2018 Jun;153(6):1443-1465. doi: 10.1016/j.chest.2018.02.026
- J Clinical Microbiology.2017 Jun;55(6):1612-1620. doi: 10.1128/JCM.02430-16