Background: In primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), an abnormal ciliary beating leads to impaired mucociliary clearance and mucus stasis within the airways. Chest physiotherapy aims to improve airway clearance. PCD diagnosis is difficult as there is no gold standard reference test, and a combination of different tests is currently used. Different clinical predictive tools exist and aim to predict the likelihood of a positive PCD diagnosis. However, the contribution of airway congestion?s evaluation by a physiotherapist in PCD diagnosis is unknown.

Aim: To evaluate the role of airway congestion assessment in PCD diagnosis.

Method: This is a retrospective study on 7 PCD patients and 7 non-PCD patients referred to our PCD diagnostic center and matched for age (mean age: 24.9±19.8 and 19.7±22.3 years, p=0.787). Each patient underwent a complete medical history and a chest physiotherapy session to assess the presence of airway congestion. We defined airway congestion as the detection of secretions within the lower airways by the physiotherapist, and chronic mucus hypersecretion (CMH) as the patient reported chronic wet cough or sputum production from chest on most days.

Results: Airway congestion was found more frequently in PCD patients (85.7%) than in non-PCD patients (42.9%) but the difference was non-significant (p=0.266). Interestingly, we found no link between reported CMH and the detection of airway congestion by the physiotherapist (63.6% and 66.7% in patients with or without CMH, respectively, p= <0.999).

Conclusions: Our pilot study showed that the assessment of airway congestion might contribute to PCD diagnosis, but larger studies on bigger cohorts are needed to confirm these preliminary results.