Hunger, thirst, nausea, and nasty tastes and odors also activate the insula. The researchers found interesting parallels between dyspnea and pain. Both activate the same part of the brain and are common symptoms of underlying diseases. Banzett cited a recent study of 1,500 people who were hospitalized for serious illnesses that identified a large group of patients who both suffered from pain and had trouble breathing. Yet pain is researched much more broadly than dyspnea.
People also experience shortness of breath, but they can almost always stop it.
You may get short of breath after running up stairs, but you can stop it by slowing down. It's when you have a disease that prevents you from easily resuming normal breathing that dyspnea becomes a problem. Part of the challenge of treating dyspnea is that there is no common language with which to analyze the condition. That's why developing the language is hard. It makes measuring the sensation a challenge.