SUMMARY Despite a variety of measurement tools none can be recommended as gold st and ard for the assessment of dyspnoea .
A combination of unidimensional and multidimensional tools seems to be the best for clinical assessment .
PURPOSE OF REVIEW Refractory dyspnoea is a common and difficult to treat symptom in advanced disease .
Accurate assessment helps to guide treatment and prognosis .
RECENT FINDINGS The absence of commonly agreed assessment tools has been a significant barrier to improving care through inhibition of clinical research and limitation of clinicians ' ability to assess the effectiveness of their interventions .
Two recently published systematic review s on measurement tools for breathlessness identified a variety of tools but none could be recommended as gold st and ard .
For clinical purpose s , the combination of a unidimensional tool to assess dyspnoea severity and a multidimensional tool to evaluate the impact on a person 's quality of life seem most appropriate .
This review discusses the present evidence and puts forward a strategy for assessment and measurement of the symptom in clinical practice .
A comparison of the visual analogue scale and modified Borg scale for the measurement of dyspnoea during exercise.
1 . The intensity of breathlessness during exercise was measured in ten normal subjects using a visual analogue scale ( VAS ) and a Borg scale to compare the use of the scales and their repeatability , both within the duration of a period of exercise and between tests . For each scale , subjects performed two exercise tests separated by a period of 2 - 6 weeks . Each exercise test consisted of two cycles of progressively increasing and decreasing workload . 2 . All subjects felt confidently able to use both scales to quantify their feelings of breathlessness exclusively of other sensation . Equal preference was expressed for use of a particular scale . 3 . With both scales there was a large intersubject variation in the relationship between dyspnoea score and minute ventilation ( VE ) ( P less than 0.01 ) , and in the range of the scale used . 4 . There was a good correlation between the VAS and Borg scores at each level of VE ( r2 = 0.71 ) , but the VAS score was used over a wider range than the Borg score . 5 . The relationship between VE and the dyspnoea score measured by the two techniques was predominantly linear . The mean r2 for VAS score/VE was 0.68 ( SD 0.19 ) and for Borg score/VE the mean r2 was 0.75 ( SD 0.13 ) . 6 . The relationships VAS score/VE and Borg score/VE were unaffected by the direction in which the workload was varied ( P greater than 0.05 ) . 7 . VE , measured at each work rate , did not differ between the two cycles ( P greater than 0.05 ) or between the 2 days ( P greater than 0.05 ) . ( ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS
SUMMARY Despite a variety of measurement tools none can be recommended as gold st and ard for the assessment of dyspnoea .
A combination of unidimensional and multidimensional tools seems to be the best for clinical assessment .
PURPOSE OF REVIEW Refractory dyspnoea is a common and difficult to treat symptom in advanced disease .
Accurate assessment helps to guide treatment and prognosis .
RECENT FINDINGS The absence of commonly agreed assessment tools has been a significant barrier to improving care through inhibition of clinical research and limitation of clinicians ' ability to assess the effectiveness of their interventions .
Two recently published systematic review s on measurement tools for breathlessness identified a variety of tools but none could be recommended as gold st and ard .
For clinical purpose s , the combination of a unidimensional tool to assess dyspnoea severity and a multidimensional tool to evaluate the impact on a person 's quality of life seem most appropriate .
This review discusses the present evidence and puts forward a strategy for assessment and measurement of the symptom in clinical practice .