Plugs and Slugs

People who have aspergillosis tend to cough up characteristic mucoid plugs often when being given oral steroids. These can take many shapes and forms and be different colours depending on what they contain – some can have hard objects within them, others can be very thick/hard on general consistency.

These can be a helpful sign for a diagnosis, so we thought is would be useful if we collected a small library of images for clinicians to refer to, which we will publish here. Patients could also use them to show to your doctor as examples of the kind of thing they are also coughing up.

Images have helpfully been donated by members of the National Aspergillosis Support UK Facebook group.