Welcome to this website. It serves as a platform for a group that is in the process of providing the world with prediction equations for pulmonary function, covering the age range from preschool children to elderly people. This entails a process that will take some time. Access to work in progress will be limited to registered members of the group.

Membership is in principle open to people

• involved in respiratory problems in industry
• who have a professional interest in the progress of this project, and/or wish to implement results once available
• who wish to contribute data
• who wish to assist with the analysis or interpretation of data.

This site also forms a platform for the WOLFAP initiative, a worldwide effort to anchor high quality pulmonary function testing firmly in medicine through certification of laboratories and respiratory technologists. In addition, at this stage 4 organisations of respiratory technologists are hosted on this website.

 ERS Task Force meeting in Barcelona  (NEWS item June 11, 2010)

The ERS has recently approved an application for Task Force Status (April 2010-March 2012) from the Global Lungs Initiative which aims to develop improved ‘all-age’ spirometric reference equations that are applicable globally. This task force, which has also been endorsed by the ATS, APSR and ANZSRS is chaired by Janet Stocks (ERS), Xaver Baur (ERS), Graham Hall (ANZSRS) and Bruce Culver (ATS) with a steering committee which includes a statistical analytical group (Philip Quanjer, Sanja Stanojevic & Tim Cole), together with Jinping Zheng (APSR), Mary Ip (APSR), Paul Enright (ATS) & John Hankinson (ATS).

A general open meeting for all interested parties, including manufacturers, is planned for the ERS meeting in Barcelona in September, when progress will be reported. This will take place on

Monday 20th September 5.15 -7pm in Room 4.3 of the main conference centre.

We will be contacting all registered members of the network (see below) nearer the day to confirm attendance.

To obtain further information and register with the Global Lungs Network for regular updates please visit www.lungfunction.org.

 Dissemination of results and update on progress
An editorial group was formed (J Stocks, PH Quanjer, X Baur, S Stanojevic, G Hall) to publish appropriate material on the Global Lungs website and disseminate a newsletter.  If you do not want to receive newsletters, please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by e-mail.

Steering Committee
The Steering Committee was extended with two representatives from the Asian Pacific Respiratory Society and now comprises the following members: Janet Stocks (ERS), Xaver Baur (ERS), Graham Hall (ANZSRS), Bruce Culver (ATS), Jinping Zheng (APSR), Mary Ip (APSR), Sanja Stanojevic, Tim Cole, Paul Enright, John Hankinson, Philip Quanjer.

Publication strategy
As over 50 groups now share data with the Global Lungs Initiative, the following publication strategy, in line with requirements adopted by leading journals, was adopted.
The writing committee for each manuscript will be named authors, and will include at least 2 relevant members of the steering committee, those actively engaged in the analytical process and any individual who makes a substantive intellectual contribution to that specific manuscript. The manuscript will be submitted on behalf of the collaborative research group, which will be comprised of persons, groups or organisations that contributed substantive original individual data sets to the manuscript in question. The nominated representative from each group/organisation will be contacted prior to substantive data analysis commencing, and will be sent an outline of the proposed manuscript in which data are to be used and a brief form to complete reaffirming permission to use data for that manuscript (see permission request on website)

Implementing forthcoming regression equations
An explanation with worked examples is available on how software engineers will be able to incorporate forthcoming regression equations into software. NEW: an error in the first worked example has been corrected 12 May 2010.

Source code of software
Source code is available which anyone, including manufacturers, can use as a template, to easily implement forthcoming equations. It is based on published equations (Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2009; 180: 547-552). The source code is available upon This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; a fully working program (Windows platform) can be downloaded from this address. July 20, 2010: new software which includes FEF25-75% and FEV0.75, and easy interpretation via pictograms.