Establishing a Normal Range for Induced Sputum Cell Counts in Western Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Induced sputum cell counts are a noninvasive, reliable method for evaluating the presence, type and degree of airway inflammation. Whether current reference values for induced sputum cell counts are applicable in other induced-sputum laboratories, particularly those in Western Canada or at elevated altitude, is not clear.OBJECTIVES: To describe the normal range of induced sputum cell counts in healthy adults in Western Canada.METHODS: A total of 105 healthy nonsmoking adults with normal bronchial responsiveness and no history of lung disease proceeded with sputum induction. Sputum samples were fixed in formalin.RESULTS: Sixty-nine subjects were included in the final analyses. The mean ± SD and median (interquartile range) of the cell counts, respectively, were: total cell count 2.453±2.108, 2.000 (2.512); neutrophils 1.212±1.491, 0.721 (1.016); eosinophils 0.034±0.069, 0.005 (0.043); macrophages 1.050±1.213, 0.696 (1.005); lymphocytes 0.057±0.161, 0.001 (0.049); and bronchial epithelial cells 0.041±0.126, 0.000 (0.027). The respective differential cell percentages were: neutrophils 50.3±23.5, 51.9 (32); eosinophils 1.4±2.3, 0.3 (2); macrophages 43±22.8, 39.3 (32); lymphocytes 2.6±5.2, 0.4 (2.5); and bronchial epithelial cells 2.2±4.8, 0.0 (2.9). Bland-Altman analysis and intraclass correlation coefficients revealed excellent interobserver agreement for measurement of sputum cell types.DISCUSSION: The range of induced sputum cell counts performed in a laboratory in Western Canada in healthy nonsmoking adult subjects was described; cellular distributions were similar to previous studies. This was also the first description of normal values for formalin-fixed induced sputum samples.CONCLUSIONS: These results confirm that current reference values for induced sputum are generalizable across different laboratories, including those in Western Canada and those at elevated altitude, and are also generalizable to formalin-fixed samples, allowing use in the broader Canadian asthma population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".