| |
Dyspnea
is often experienced with exercise and resolves with rest. Thus,
if you ask a person about his or her breathing discomfort, you
must often rely on their memory of the event.
Question
5.1
Is an individual's
recall at rest of the quality of their breathing discomfort a
reliable indicator of the descriptions used during exercise?
Applications of dyspnea
questionnaires to assist in the diagnosis of patients with breathing
discomfort are in preliminary stages. Physicians, like their patients,
often do not have the personal experience of breathing discomfort
other than exercise-related breathlessness. Consequently, they
may have little personal information upon which to draw to assist
the patient in describing the quality of her breathing discomfort.
Dyspnea questionnaires fill this gap.
Data suggest that attention
to the qualities of breathing discomfort may assist in establishing
a diagnosis of asthma in patients presenting with dyspnea and
normal lung function (Chevalier et al.,
2001), and may assist in the analysis of the response to
bronchodilators of patients with asthma in an emergency department
(Moy et al., 1998). The following table summarizes some common
dyspnea descriptors and the conditions with which they are most
frequently associated:
|
Table 5.1: Common Dyspnea Descriptors and their Conditions
|
| Descriptor
| Condition
|
|---|
| Chest
Tightness | Asthma
(Simon et al., 1990) |
Inability
to get a deep breath
Unsatisfying Breath | COPD
Hyperinflation (O'Donnell et al., 1997) |
Air
Hunger
Urge to Breathe | Congestive
heart failure
COPD
Asthma
Neuromuscular weakness (Simon et al., 1990) |
Heavy
Breathing
Breathing More | Peripheral
muscle atrophy
Cardiovascular deconditioning (Mahler et al., 1996) |
|
|