TY - JOUR T1 - A common model for the breathlessness experience across cardiorespiratory disease JF - ERJ Open Research JO - erjor DO - 10.1183/23120541.00818-2020 SP - 00818-2020 AU - Sarah L. Finnegan AU - Kyle T.S. Pattinson AU - Josefin Sundh AU - Magnus Sköld AU - Christer Janson AU - Anders Blomberg AU - Jacob Sandberg AU - Magnus Ekström Y1 - 2021/01/01 UR - http://openres.ersjournals.com/content/early/2021/02/18/23120541.00818-2020.abstract N2 - Introduction Chronic breathlessness occurs across many different conditions, often independently of disease severity. Yet, despite being strongly linked to adverse outcomes, the consideration of chronic breathlessness as a stand-alone therapeutic target remains limited. Here we use data-driven techniques to identify and confirm the stability of underlying features (factors) driving breathlessness across different cardiorespiratory diseases.Methods Study of questionnaire data on 182 participants with main diagnoses of asthma (21.4%), COPD (24.7%), heart failure (19.2%), idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (18.7%), other interstitial lung disease (5.5%), and “other diagnoses” (8.8%) were entered into an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Participants were stratified based on their EFA factor scores. We then examined model stability using six-month follow-up data and established the most compact set of measures describing the breathlessness experience.Results In this dataset, we have identified four stable factors that underlie the experience of breathlessness. These factors were assigned the following descriptive labels: 1) body burden, 2) affect/mood, 3) breathing burden and 4) anger/frustration. Stratifying patients by their scores across the four factors revealed two groups corresponding to high and low burden. These two groups were not related to the primary disease diagnosis and remained stable after six months.Discussion In this work we identified and confirmed the stability of underlying features of breathlessness. Previous work in this domain has been largely limited to single-diagnosis patient groups without subsequent re-testing of model stability. This work provides further evidence supporting disease independent approaches to assess breathlessness.FootnotesThis manuscript has recently been accepted for publication in the ERJ Open Research. It is published here in its accepted form prior to copyediting and typesetting by our production team. After these production processes are complete and the authors have approved the resulting proofs, the article will move to the latest issue of the ERJOR online. Please open or download the PDF to view this article.Conflict of interest: Dr. Finnegan has nothing to disclose.Conflict of interest: Dr. Pattinson reports In addition, Dr. Pattinson has a patent U.K. patent application titled “Use of cerebral nitric oxide donors in the assessment of the extent of brain dysfunction following injury pending.Conflict of interest: Dr. Sundh has nothing to disclose.Conflict of interest: Dr. Sköld has nothing to disclose.Conflict of interest: Dr. Janson has nothing to disclose.Conflict of interest: Dr. Blomberg has nothing to disclose.Conflict of interest: Dr. Sandberg has nothing to disclose.Conflict of interest: Dr. Ekström has nothing to disclose. ER -