Breathing Pattern Disorder

Breathing pattern disorder (BrPD), also called dysfunctional breathing, is a persistent or recurrent change in breathing that causes breathlessness and related symptoms beyond what physiological demand or any underlying disease would explain.

It may occur on its own or alongside cardiac, respiratory, upper-airway or other conditions. It is probably under-recognised in athletes and is easily confused with asthma, exercise-induced bronchoconstriction (EIB) and exercise-induced laryngeal obstruction (EILO), especially as routine tests are often normal.

An athlete can spend years labelled with difficult asthma, on treatment that does not help, when the problem is the breathing pattern. Recognising the pattern, excluding significant disease and directing the athlete to breathing retraining turns an unexplained problem into a manageable one.