| Summary: | Patients with chronic dyspnoea may learn to fear situations that cue dyspnoea onset. Such dyspnoea-specific cues may then cause anxiety, and worsen or trigger dyspnoea even before commencement of physical activity. We therefore developed an experimental tool to probe recall of dyspnoea and dyspnoea-related anxiety for use with neuroimaging in COPD. The tool consists of a computerized task comprising multiple presentations of dyspnoea-related word cues. Following 3 development stages, sensitivity to clinical change was tested in 34 COPD patients undergoing pulmonary rehabilitation. We measured internal consistency, sensitivity to clinical change and convergence with established dyspnoea measures (including Dyspnoea-12). Cronbach’s alpha was 0.90 for dyspnoea and 0.94 for anxiety ratings. Ratings correlated with Dyspnoea-12 (dyspnoea: r=0.51, P=0.002; anxiety: r=0.54, P=0.001). Reductions in anxiety ratings post-pulmonary rehabilitation correlated with reductions in Dyspnoea-12 (r=0.51, P=0.002). We conclude that the word-cue task is reliable for measuring recalled dyspnoea and dyspnoea-related anxiety in COPD, and is thus a potentially useful tool for neuroimaging dyspnoea research.
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