Roland W Esser

University Medical Center Hamburg - Eppendorf · Department of Systems Neuroscience

Breathlessness is an aversive symptom in many prevalent somatic and psychiatric diseases and is usually experienced as highly threatening. It is strongly associated with negative affect, but the underlying neural processes remain poorly understood. Therefore, using fMRI, the present study examined the effects of breathlessness on the neural process...

Dyspnea is an aversive symptom in various diseases. High levels of negative affectivity are typically associated with increased dyspnea and changes in its neural processing. Recently, more dyspnea-specific forms of negative affectivity such as dyspnea catastrophizing were suggested to contribute to increased perception of dyspnea beyond effects of...

Background: Dyspnea is the impairing cardinal symptom in COPD, but the underlying brain mechanisms and their relationships to clinical patient characteristics are widely unknown. This study compared neural responses to the perception and anticipation of dyspnea between patients with stable moderate-to-severe COPD and healthy controls. Moreover, ass...

Dyspnea is common in many cardiorespiratory diseases. Already the anticipation of this aversive symptom elicits fear in many patients resulting in unfavorable health behaviors such as activity avoidance and sedentary lifestyle. This study investigated brain mechanisms underlying these anticipatory processes. We induced dyspnea using resistive-load...

Patients with COPD suffer from chronic dyspnea. Previous studies on the neural mechanisms underlying dyspnea perception were investigated in healthy volunteers only. We tested whether COPD patients compared to healthy controls show different neural responses while anticipating and perceiving dyspnea, and whether neural responses correlate with dise...

Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) suffer from chronic dyspnea, which is commonly perceived as highly aversive and threatening. Moreover, COPD is often accompanied by disease-specific fears and avoidance of physical activity. However, little is known about structural brain changes in COPD patients and respective relations wi...

Dyspnea is a prevalent and threatening cardinal symptom in many diseases including asthma. Whether patients suffering from dyspnea show habituation or sensitization toward repeated experiences of dyspnea is relevant for both quality of life and treatment success. Understanding the mechanisms, including the underlying brain activation patterns, that...

Dyspnea anticipation and perception varies largely between individuals. To investigate whether genetic factors related to negative affect such as the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism impact this variability, we investigated healthy, 5-HTTLPR stratified volunteers using resistive load induced dyspnea together with fMRI. Alternating blocks of severe and mild dy...

Bei sehr schlecht belastbaren Patienten mit COPD kann durch die Anwendung von Neuromuskulärer Elektrostimulation (NMES) der unteren Extremität eine Steigerung der körperlichen Belastbarkeit erreicht werden. Die vorliegende Untersuchung soll die Frage beantworten, ob die Anwendung von NMES auch im Rahmen einer dreiwöchigen Rehabilitationsmaßnahme ef...

Objective Patients with respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease frequently experience respiratory sensations, which are often perceived as unpleasant or threatening. However, the accurate perception of respiratory sensations is important for the management and treatment of these diseases. Emotions can substanti...