Office Research:

Breath Holding Study

Published in Lyndonville News, November 2001

Summarized by David Bell, MD, FAAP

Executed and Analyzed by Paula Corser and Jill Booth

Several months ago I happened to be talking with Dr. Paul Cheney, and he mentioned an observation he had made that patients with CFS have difficulty holding their breath. Odd, strange, but very easy to check, and possibly important in unraveling the mystery behind the illness. So I asked several of my patients to hold their breath, and to my surprise, it was very short. One person, a young nonsmoker, could hold her breath for only 12 seconds.

Persons with CFS are frequently breathless without clear signs of lung or heart disease. On my office questionnaire I have episodes of short of breath and probably one third of patients complain about this. Standard testing, chest x-ray and other tests do not reveal any characteristic pattern so the symptom is chalked up to hypochondriasis and the matter is forgotten by all except the patient.

So I tried a little study. I asked patients to hold their breath and did the same for the same number of healthy persons. These controls were not matched, as this was just an informal study. The results were dramatic. Both patients and controls were told to hold their breath as long as they are able.

There were 31 patients and 31 controls. The average patient was able to hold their breath for 22 seconds vs. 47 seconds for controls. A graph of the frequency distribution of the lengths of time for each group showed a peak for the CFS group at 11 to 15 seconds and a peak for the controls at 51 - 55 seconds. The difference between CFS and control populations in simple breath holding is statistically significant in this preliminary observation.

This is another interesting and intriguing detail about CFS. It is unlikely to change much now, because skeptics will say that CFS patients don’t try very hard to do anything, including holding their breath, an opinion that I would disagree with. Twenty years from now we will be slapping our forehead because all these things fit so nicely and the answer was obvious.

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