The aim of this study was to assess the diagnostic performance of fibrobronchoscopy (FBS) in the pulmonary pathology of HIV-positive patients, in order to study the effect of several factors on such performance and to evaluate if these factors could guide the etiologic diagnosis. A retrospective study of 49 FBS with bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) was performed in 44 HIV-positive patients. The diagnostic performance of FBS with BAL was 71.4%, with no significant modifications caused by previous prophylactic or empirical therapies, time of clinical evolution, radiological pattern, presence of hypoxemia or CD4 count. On the contrary, a high LDH was associated to a higher diagnostic performance.
Diagnosis: Pneumonia by Pneumocystis carinii (36.7%), M. tuberculosis (28.6%) and bacterial pneumonias (16.3%). The presence of biliary adenopathies, evolution longer than 1 week and pO2 > 80 mm Hg had a high sensitivity of 28.5% and a specificity of 97% for the diagnosis of tuberculosis, with a positive predictive value of 80% and a negative predictive value of 77.7%.