A revision of the dyspnea measuring method literature

Abstract

Dyspnea is not only the difficulty that one, who suffers from either lung, heart, metabolic or psychogenic disorders, has to breathe, but also uncomfortable breath. This kind of symptom is extremely embarrassing to the patients, since it leads them to the reduction of their functional activities.As each patient reacts to the dyspnea's symptoms differently from the others, and the physician cannot feel exactly what his/her patient feels, dyspnea becomes a subjective symptom so that it is hard to be accurately measured.The aim of this paper is to explain the methods that are mostly used by physicians in order to measure it. For this reason some current dyspnea measuring methods were put together and studied. Thirty-one articles about the subject were analyzed and eight methods were joined. The results of the study led to the conclusion that Borg’s modified scale is the most used one, followed by (in order of importance) the Visual Analogic scale, Medical Research Council scale, and Base Index of dyspnea.