EDITORIALS
Breathing exercises for asthma
Breathing exercises for asthma: panacea or placebo?
Correspondence to:
Professor Mike G Pearson, Clinical Sciences Centre, University Hospital Aintree, Longmoor Lane, Liverpool L9 7AL, UK; michael.pearson@liverpool.ac.uk
The finding that patients with asthma feel better after breathing exercises cannot be ignored
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Breathing is easy—we all do it all of the time from the moment we are born. So why should it be necessary to teach people how to breathe? How is it possible to get something wrong when it appears so simple? And, if it is wrong, can it be corrected?
In this issue of Thorax Holloway and West1 report a randomised trial of adding the Papworth technique—a combination of breathing and relaxation exercises first introduced for hyperventilation syndromes—to usual care in patients with asthma (see p 1039). They recruited 85 volunteers with asthma from a primary care asthma register, 72 of whom completed the parallel group study and were followed up for 12 months. The group had relatively mild asthma with mean forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1) >90% predicted and thus, unsurprisingly, there were no significant improvements in the conventional physiological
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This article has been cited by other articles:
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Thomas, M, McKinley, R K, Mellor, S, Watkin, G, Holloway, E, Scullion, J, Shaw, D E, Wardlaw, A, Price, D, Pavord, I
(2009). Breathing exercises for asthma: a randomised controlled trial. Thorax
64: 55-61
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