Pulmonary and asthma screenings can help you find out how well you’re breathing. Your Banner Health doctor will evaluate your lung condition and may use a variety of tests to help determine if anything is wrong.
Your physician may refer you for testing to:
At Banner Health, we focus not just on your lung function but also on the factors that can contribute to breathing problems. These underlying factors include allergies and gastrointestinal disorders.
We also consider how breathing problems can affect your quality of life. For example, if breathing problems keep you from getting a good night’s sleep, you may be a good candidate for another test called a sleep study.
We perform the following diagnostic and screening tests.
There are two types of testing we use to diagnose allergies that can trigger asthma attacks:
This test evaluates how well air moves in and out of your lungs and how well oxygen moves into your body. Common pulmonary function tests include:
In addition to the more common pulmonary function tests, we also offer special tests to measure airway resistance and to measure respiratory muscle strength.
Exercise testing, also called stress testing, monitors how your heart, lungs and muscles respond to exercise. Exercise testing methods include:
A bronchial challenge test measures how easily your airways develop spasm in response to a trigger. We offer methacholine challenge testing and post-exercise spirometry to evaluate for asthma, exercise-induced asthma and other causes of airway spasm.
Oxygen titration measures how much oxygen you need. We can perform oxygen saturation assessment during rest and with exercise to evaluate if there is any need for oxygen. We can also perform oxygen titration during activity to determine exactly how much oxygen is appropriate.
We can determine how much oxygen, carbon dioxide and acid are in your blood with an arterial blood glass analysis. This test typically involves briefly inserting a small needle into the artery in your wrist.
Bronchoscopy is an outpatient procedure that we perform to sample lung fluid and evaluate for infection.