ABSTRACT
Dyspnea is an important, common, and disabling symptom that remains poorly understood. Despite the prevalence and ubiquity of dyspnea across medical disciplines, approaches to dyspnea treatment and management remain imperfect. From the neurobiologist’s perspective, an individual’s awareness of dyspnea may be best conceptualized as a perception of homeostatic imbalance. The field of dyspnea neuroimaging remains in its infancy, with about a dozen published dyspnea-specific studies from just a handful of laboratories around the globe. From a historical perspective, oxygen-15-labeled water (O-15 PET) was considered the gold standard technique for human neuroimaging studies. Even though O-15 PET studies have provided significant insights into dyspnea neural circuitry, the potential utility for O-15 PET-based patient studies has yet to be fully realized. The field of dyspnea neuroimaging stands to advance from the application of several established neuroimaging techniques that have yet to be applied to the study of dyspnea.
