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Questions: Are volunteered and endorsed descriptors of recalled breathlessness consistent with descriptors of exerciseinduced breathlessness? Are volunteered and endorsed descriptors of exercise-induced breathlessness consistent? Design: Within-participant, repeated measures, experimental study. Participants: 57 people with symptomatic chronic respiratory disease aged 71 years. Intervention: There were three conditions. The first was recalled breathlessness. Two conditions of exercise-induced breathlessness were created by getting the participants to undertake the 6-min Walk Test twice (breathlessness 1 and 2). Outcome measures: Descriptors of breathlessness were volunteered (where participants’ used their own words) or endorsed (from a pre-existing list of 15 breathlessness statements). Results: Emotive descriptors made up 65% of recalled descriptors compared with 11% of exercise-induced descriptors, whereas physical descriptors made up 35% of recalled descriptors compared with 89% of exercise-induced descriptors. Of the 237 potential language pairs volunteered to describe recalled and exercise-induced breathlessness 1, only 27 (11%) were identical whereas of the 171 potential language pairs endorsed as describing recalled and exercise-induced breathlessness 1, 66 (39%) were identical. Of the 175 potential language pairs of descriptors volunteered to describe exercise-induced breathlessness 1 and 2, 72 (41%) were identical whereas of the 153 potential language pairs endorsed as describing exercise-induced breathlessness 1 and 2, 71 (46%) were identical. Conclusion: The language used to describe exercise-induced breathlessness immediately after two walking challenges was similar. However, descriptions of recalled breathlessness did not consistently match descriptions of exercise-induced breathlessness, which may reflect the different contexts under which breathlessness was recalled and induced. [Williams M, Garrard A, Cafarella P, Petkov J, Frith P (2009) Quality of recalled dyspnoea is different than exercise-induced dyspnoea: an experimental study. Australian Journal of Physiotherapy 55: 177–183]

Dyspnoea is an uncomfortable conscious awareness of breathing. Since the late 1980s, studies on the language used to describe the sensation of breathlessness have emerged in order to understand mechanisms and differences between chronic diseases. This systematic review aimed to consider primary studies of the language of breathlessness in order to describe the evolution of this field, methodological approaches, key findings and, identify areas which require further investigation. A systematic search process was used to identify thirty-five primary studies. This field of study has evolved rapidly over the past eighteen years. Descriptions of the sensation of breathlessness have been acquired by subjects either selecting a descriptor statement from a pre-existing list (endorsed) or describing the sensation in their own words (volunteered). Three common inventories have been used by the majority of studies to obtain qualitative descriptors of breathlessness. Studies have generally focused upon on physical descriptors of the sensation, though the need for similar studies in the affective domain has been acknowledged. Clear associations between descriptions of breathlessness and medical conditions have been reported, though consistency between studies is equivocal. Further investigations are required to confirm the consistency of the language of breathlessness within people with the same medical conditions, reliability between occasions of assessment (subject in the same state of breathlessness), consistency between recalled descriptions and reality of the experience, changes in the qualitative sensation of breathless over the natural history of chronic diseases, impact of interventions of the sensation of breathlessness, and differences between adults and children. Refereed/Peer-reviewed