Millions of people around the world live with breathlessness due to underlying medical conditions. It’s a problem that’s not often discussed yet has a major impact on their lives.
Simply put, these people can’t catch their breath. And when the problem gets worse it can lead to a crisis. In fact, it is responsible for as many as 20% of ambulance trips to the hospital.
But people who suffer from chronic breathlessness could often manage the problem at home better if only they were given support. This would avoid a potentially difficult experience for patients and their carers and prevent a wasted health service time and money for emergency departments.
Traditionally, the management of patients with lung, heart and neuro-muscular diseases has focused only on the underlying disease – for example, the emphysema – without routinely looking at the impact that being out of breath over months and years has on patients’ everyday lives, or how that can be helped.
Here in the Wolfson Palliative Care Research Centre, we are carrying out research into breathlessness to positively impact the lives of those living with the symptom. We hope to enable patients to share their concerns about their ongoing breathlessness with doctors and nurses and for clinicians to ask patients routinely, and to share self-help techniques which can help relieve breathlessness. We are also developing and testing interventions in clinical trials using such techniques to see if they help, and can be afforded by the NHS.