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Sputum is a combination of saliva and mucus in the lungs. Doctors collect samples by having patients cough into a cup or using a tube inserted into the nose or throat. Precautions are taken to avoid contamination, and samples are tested for infections to determine treatment approaches. Patients may need to drink water or have fluid added directly to their lungs to produce a good sample.
Sputum is usually a combination of saliva and mucus that forms in a person’s lungs. To collect a sputum sample, doctors typically have the patient cough deeply and spit it into a cup. Some precautions are often taken to avoid any contamination of the sample, and sometimes the patient has to drink extra fluids to increase the amount of lung secretion. In other situations, doctors have to aspirate sputum through a tube inserted into the nose that goes back to the throat. This method is especially common for patients who are too seriously ill to cough up their own samples—sometimes, doctors may even have to take those samples with a syringe inserted down their throat.
When taking a sputum sample, doctors sometimes ask the patient to clean her mouth first. This is often done very carefully to avoid adding chemicals to the sample. Chemicals can sometimes kill bacteria or viruses, and the whole purpose of collecting sputum samples is usually to see if there is anything foreign living inside someone’s lungs. The safest way to clean your mouth is usually to rinse it with water.
After collecting sputum, doctors will generally use portions of the samples to test for various infections. This is done by putting sputum on foods that different types of bacteria and other foreign invaders like to eat. If something grows on these foods, it tells doctors what kind of infection the patient has. This can be helpful for doctors in determining the best treatment approaches for someone with a respiratory disease. Sometimes it is especially necessary when the disease is mysterious and does not respond to normal treatment measures.
Sometimes patients may have difficulty coughing up a good sputum sample. In such situations, doctors may ask patients to drink some water and then come back about an hour later for another try. Dehydration is one of the most common problems during sputum collection because it reduces the available fluid in the lungs. Drinking water is generally the most obvious way to deal with this problem, but there are others as well.
Doctors sometimes insert a tube into your breathing passage to add fluid directly to your lungs. This fluid generally mixes with dried mucus and, when the patient expels it, is essentially equivalent to a normal sputum sample. This procedure can sometimes be somewhat uncomfortable, so doctors usually sedate patients first.
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