How to Get the Most from Your Equine Bronchoalveolar Lavage (BAL) Sample

摘要

Bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) has been for used for basic diagnostics in horses for many years but no international standardized operating procedure has been established in relation to performing the BAL, staining, cytospin contra pellet-smear, skilledversus non-skilled laboratory evaluators.By comparison to human medicine, recommendations are established for standardization of all steps of the BAL procedure, which have been evaluated and published by the European Respiratory Society in 1999 (Haslam and Baughman, 1999) and the British Thoracic Society in 2001(British Thoracic Society Bronchoscopy Guidelines Committee, 2001).This presentation aims to outline considerations for a standardized BAL procedure in horses for cytology in relation to: Inter -and intra-observer agreement, mast cell coloring, cytospin versus pellet-smear, temperature and storage time.