Respiratory resistance and reactance in adults with sickle cell anemia: Correlation with functional exercise capacity and diagnostic use.

BACKGROUND: The improvement in sickle cell anemia (SCA) care resulted in the emergence of a large population of adults living with this disease. The mechanisms of lung injury in this new population are largely unknown. The forced oscillation technique (FOT) represents the current state-of-the-art in the assessment of lung function. The present work uses the FOT to improve our knowledge about the respiratory abnormalities in SCA, evaluates the associations of FOT with the functional exercise capacity and investigates the early detection of respiratory abnormalities.

METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Spirometric classification of restrictive abnormalities resulted in three categories: controls (n = 23), patients with a normal exam (n = 21) and presenting pulmonary restriction (n = 24). FOT analysis showed that, besides restrictive changes (reduced compliance; p<0.001), there is also an increase in respiratory resistance (p<0.001) and ventilation heterogeneity (p<0.01). FOT parameters are associated with functional exercise capacity (R = -0.38), pulmonary diffusion (R = 0.66), respiratory muscle performance (R = 0.41), pulmonary volumes (R = 0.56) and airway obstruction (R = 0.54). The diagnostic accuracy was evaluated by investigating the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). A combination of FOT and machine learning (ML) classifiers showed adequate diagnostic accuracy in the detection of early respiratory abnormalities (AUC = 0.82).

CONCLUSIONS: In this study, the use of FOT showed that adults with SCA develop a mixed pattern of respiratory disease. Changes in FOT parameters are associated with functional exercise capacity decline, abnormal pulmonary mechanics and diffusion. FOT associated with ML methods accurately diagnosed early respiratory abnormalities. This suggested the potential utility of the FOT and ML clinical decision support systems in the identification of respiratory abnormalities in patients with SCA.