Bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) is a useful tool in researches and in clinical medicine of lung diseases because the BAL fluid contains biochemical and cytological indicators of the cellular response to infection, drugs, or toxicants. However, the variability among laboratories regarding the technique and the processing of the BAL material limits clinical research. The aim of this study was to determine the suction frequency and lavage fraction number necessary to reduce the variability in lavage using male Sprague-Dawley rats. We compared the total cell number and protein level of each lavage fraction and concluded that more cells and protein can be obtained by repetitive lavage with a suction frequency of 2 or 3 than by lavage with a single suction. On the basis of total cell recovery, approximately 70% of cells were obtained from fractions 1~3. The first lavage fraction should be used for evaluation of protein concentration because fractions 2~5 of lavage fluid were diluted in manifolds. These observations were confirmed in bleomycin-induced inflamed lungs of rats. We further compared the BAL data from the whole lobes with data from the right lobes and concluded that BAL data of the right lobes represented data of the whole lobes. However, this conclusion can only be applied to general lung diseases. At the end, this study provides an insight into the technical or analytical problems of lavage study in vivo.
Keywords: BAL fluid; Bronchoalveolar lavage; Lavage fraction number; Suction frequency number.