Measurement of breathlessness

There are many measurement approaches and instruments for assessing the sensory-perceptual experience of breathlessness, the associated affective distress and how breathlessness impacts an individual’s functioning and quality of life. Choices of which measures to use should be driven by the relevance of the measured construct(s) to the context(s) of use, and, in palliative care, by the responsiveness of measures to clinical change and by their ease of administration and scoring. Evidence of adequate psychometric performance characteristics can be viewed as necessary but not sufficient for preferring one measurement approach or instrument to another in palliative care.