Dyspnea relief: More than just the perception of a decrease in dyspnea

Like relief in general, relief of dyspnea is the fundamental quite familiar subjective experience associated with the offset of, or decrease in an unpleasant stimulus associated most frequently with an emotion of pleasantness. Dyspnea relief can be experienced in normal daily life, but most often, occurs during recovery from the large number of various diseases where dyspnea is frequently the predominant symptom. In the present paper, after a brief review of current knowledge of the mechanisms of action of currently available therapeutic interventions for dyspnea, I shall address more extensively the specificity of relief in the larger framework of psychological models relative to human perception and emotion. More specifically, I show that emerging, albeit preliminary results, including personal work, support the view that dyspnea relief is a specific sensori-emotional experience involving a characteristic central processing, and that it is more complex than the mere perception of a decrease in dyspnea.