Society Fellow identifies the cause of wheezing in the Lungs

Dr Anurag Agarwal, a Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society has worked with a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge to identify the cause of wheezing in the lungs.

The paper; An Experimental Investigation to Model Wheezing in Lungs was co-authored by Dr Anurag Agarwal, Head of the Acoustics lab in the Department of Engineering and the results published in the Royal Society Open Science journal.

Dr Agarwal said he first got the idea to study wheezing after a family vacation several years ago. “I started wheezing the first night we were there, which had never happened to me before.”

By modelling the airways of the lungs with a modified Starling resistor, in which airflow is driven through thin, stretched elastic tubes the team were able to find a generalised ‘tube law’ that describes how the cross sectional area of the tubes change in response to the transmural pressure difference across them.

It is hoped that the findings will allow for a predictive tool for wheezing in lungs, which could lead to better diagnosis and treatment of lung diseases.

Read the fully article here: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/identification-of-violent-processes-that-cause-wheezing-could-lead-to-better-diagnosis-and-treatment

Paper: Royal Society Open Science (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.201951

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