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McCormack believes simple lung function results accrued over a lifetime can optimize an individual's pulmonary care.
Despite serving an invaluable role in diagnosing type and severity of lung disease, there is no high precedent for pulmonologists to consistent conduct pulmonary function tests (PFTs) on new patients.1 In fact, a simple test even like a spirometry is not utilized as frequently as one would expect, explained Meredith McCormack, MD.
“If you’re going to see a cardiologist, you would expect to get an EKG, or you might expect to get an echocardiogram — and you even have those studies ordered very commonly from primary care doctors,” McCormack. Why isn’t pulmonology following suit?
We used to interpret lung function so that a Black individual would be compared to a healthy population of other Black individuals…but with GLI Global, we’re now really recommending one approach for everyone, so that were interpreting lung function in the context of all other people. And I think that’s really a step forward.2
In an interview with HCPLive during the American College of CHEST Physicians (CHEST) 2025 Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL, this week, McCormack, director of the Division of Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, discussed the opportunity to increase uptake of PFTs including spirometry among her colleagues seeking answers to patients’ respiratory symptoms.
An obvious hurdle to toward uptake, McCormack said, is the sentiment that PFTs are complicated to conduct and their results are difficult to interpret. As part of her presentation on the subject at CHEST 2025, McCormack reviewed normal versus abnormal readouts for spirometry measures and how to properly define lung health against the standard of a healthy population.
McCormack empathized with her colleagues’ challenges with grappling variable data and new or evolving measures of lung function. Her message is straightforward: keep spirometry readouts simple, and assess it in the context of the full patient.
“How can we better incorporate people's reported symptoms, their risk factors — whether it's from smoking or vaping or a job they may have had over a lifetime?” she said. “I think we'll become more able to integrate those types of data points into spirometry and lung function.”
McCormack’s hope is to achieve a standard where spirometry tests are implemented throughout an individual’s lifespan — creating inflection points of shifting lung health and giving clinicians a clearer understanding of a single patient’s standard for healthy and functioning.
“That would be something to aspire to, where people could be trending their values related to their historic values, rather than trying to understand their values relative to other healthy people,” she said.
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