Peak expiratory flow

This is Dr. Matt Kastera podcasting from fabulous Cleveland, Ohio.

This is the July 2026 audio podcast summary, featuring articles on bacterial and viral co-infections, utilizing peak flow in asthmatic patients, minor strokes, the diagnosis of cellulitis, and large language models for ENT emergencies.

I'm excited to have Dr. Matthew Dziejolka here with me on the podcast to cover a board review session on abdominal compartment syndrome.

As always, I'd like to keep this podcast both accurate and clinically useful to you.

So why is this important? Well, asthma exacerbations are a common chief complaint that we see in the ED, accounting for 1.8 million ED visits and 170,000 hospitalizations each year in the United States.

So the Global Initiative for Asthma, or GINA guidelines, recommend treatment for asthma based on level of severity of the exacerbation.

So as we know, there are many ways to determine the severity of an asthma exacerbation, including physical exam findings, vital signs, patient's report of how severe their symptoms are, or more objective pulmonary function testing, such as peak flow measurements.

So prior studies have shown that a forced expiratory volume in one second, or FEV1, and peak expiratory flow rate, or PEFR, have been shown to reflect the severity of asthma exacerbations more reliably than any clinical predictor.