Barcelona hosted from the 14th to the 17th of June, the "http://www.congresosepar2013.com/modules.php?name=webstructure&idwebstructure=1" 46th Congress of the Spanish Society for Pneumology and Thoracic Surgery (SEPAR). More than 2,000 professionals in this field participated in this meeting led by Dr. Morell, head of the Pneumology Group at Vall d’Hebron Institute of Research. During the congress, his group presented a diagnostic method to quantify the levels of asbestos in the lung, without using aggressive surgery techniques.The new method uses the bronchoalveolar lavage to obtain a representative sample of alveolus and determining the presence of asbestos. With this technique, Dr. Maria Jesús Cruz, researcher from the Pneumology group at VHIR, assures that “it is possible to determine clearly if a patient has been exposed to asbestos, measuring its presence in the lung”. This test has legal and medical consequences because “if asbestos is detected in the lung of patients with cancer, they can be recognized with an occupational and environmental respiratory disease”.Besides this study, in the congress also were presented the last advances in tuberculosis, the epidemiological development of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as well as the link between sleep apnea and lung cancer.