Sherwood Burge presented a case of a lecturer in bricklaying whose occupational asthma was due to lime dust exposure. He proposed that this was an example of low dose irritant induced asthma with latency, which may produce similar disease and physiological changes and symptoms to sensitiser induced occupational asthma.

Vicky Moore (in abenstia) presented a poster on the effect of shift type (day shift, afternoon shift or night shift) on peak flow. The main conclusions are that day shifts are likely to have higher ABC scores than afternoon night shifts in patients with occupational asthma, although there is a lot of noise and this varies widely between patients. The 15 l/min/hr cut off for analysing day shifts with the ABC score is applicable to all shift types.

Effect of Shift Work on Peak Flow

Vicky Moore (in abensentia) presented a poster on how the precision of pef measurement affected the various scores. The timepoint score works much better with precise data, the other scores are all very robust and work nearly as well after an artificial measurement error was introduced. This shows that more frequent readings are more important than the precision of individual readings as imprecision should be similar on work and rest days.

Effect of meter quality on Oasys scores

Cedd Burge gave a talk on some refinements to the timepoint scoring  technique. This improved the theoretical results but was no better in practice so we are sticking with the original timepoint score at the moment. Some further work may be required on how much sleep affects circadian rhythm.

Timepoint version 2 talk at the ERS 2010

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