Assessment of functional abnormalities in infants and children with lung disease.

Lung function testing in infants and children has to cover a wide palette of various investigational procedures and the fact that babies can predominantly only be tested asleep and young children may not cooperate accurately must be taken into account. There is still a life-span between 2 and 5 years in which lung function testing is impossible. Different techniques for infants lung function testing (spirometry, squeeze-jacket method, forced oscillation technique, occlusion technique, whole-body infant-plethysmography, multibreath nitrogen washout (MBNW), interruption technique), which helps already in early childhood to evaluate objectively clinical findings in infants after infant respiratory distress syndrome (iRDS) with/or without hyaline membrane disease (HMD), developing or not developing broncho-pulmonary dysplasia (BPD), wheezy bronchitis or cystic fibrosis (CF) are available. Lung function techniques in children include spirometry, whole-body plethysmography, multibreath nitrogen washout (MBNW), interruption technique, bronchial challenge tests, exercise testing.