Spanish Guidelines on the Evaluation and Diagnosis of Bronchiectasis in Adults

In 2008, the Spanish Society of Pulmonology (SEPAR) published the first guidelines in the world on the diagnosis and treatment of bronchiectasis. Almost 10 years later, considerable scientific advances have been made in both the treatment and the evaluation and diagnosis of this disease, and the original guidelines have been updated to include the latest scientific knowledge on bronchiectasis. These new recommendations have been drafted following a strict methodological process designed to ensure the quality of content, and are linked to a large amount of online information that includes a wealth of references. These guidelines cover aspects ranging from a consensual definition of bronchiectasis to an evaluation of the natural course and prognosis of the disease. The topics of greatest interest and some new areas are addressed, including epidemiology and economic costs of bronchiectasis, pathophysiological aspects, the causes (placing particular emphasis on the relationship with other airway diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma), clinical and functional aspects, measurement of quality of life, radiological diagnosis and assessment, diagnostic algorithms, microbiological aspects (including the definition of key concepts, such as bacterial eradication or chronic bronchial infection), and the evaluation of severity and disease prognosis using recently published multidimensional tools.