Abstrakt

Not only the perception, but already the anxious anticipation of breathlessness can trigger a vicious circle of breathlessness in COPD via avoidance behavior, deconditioning and ever increasing breathlessness. The underlying brain processes are poorly understood. First available studies demonstrate that during the perception of breathlessness, COPD patients show activations in sensomotoric and affective-cognitive brain areas. These seem widely comparable with activation patterns in healthy control subjects and only in subgroups of patients differences emerge. During the anticipation of breathlessness, however, increased activations are observable in COPD patients in affectivecognitive brain areas. These are further associated with clinically relevant outcomes such as anxiety, breathlessness, reduced exercise capacity, and quality of life. These neural findings suggest that patients with COPD show an increased anxious anticipation of breathlessness. This might negatively impact the course of disease and should be accounted for in the treatment.

Autoreninformation

Autoren

• A. von Leupoldt

Abteilungen

• Health Psychology, University of Leuven, Belgium

Adresse

Prof. Dr. Andreas von Leupoldt
Health Psychology
University of Leuven
Tiensestraat 102
3000 Leuven, Belgium
Email: [email protected]

Citation