Abstract: Objective · To investigate and compare the clinical characteristic of non-organic dyspnea and asthma both with complaint of dyspnea.  Methods · Seventy-four consecutive patients with non-organic dyspnea, and 74 age-, height-, weight and sex-matched patients with asthma were recruited for investigation in the study. The self-assessment surveys were conducted for the two groups by means of Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, Nijmegen Questionnaire and Athens Insomnia Scale. The words for describing dyspnea, clinical symptoms ,effective sleep hours and items of pulmonary function test were collected and analyzed  Results · Non-organic dyspnea patients tended to describe psychogenic aspects. Asthma patients tended to describe airflow limitation. Non-organic dyspnea group mainly performed psychogenic symptoms. The sleeping time in non-organic dyspnea group was significantly lower than that in asthma group(P<0.05). The score of anxiety, depression, Nijmegen Questionnaire, Athens Insomnia Scale, FEV1, FEV1%Pred, FVC%Pred, FEV1/FVC in non-organic dyspnea group were significantly higher than those in asthma group (P<0.05). There was no significant difference in FVC between two groups(P>0.05).  Conclusion · The non-organic group feel more anxiety, depressed and insomnic than the asthma group. Lung function test of asthma group is offen abnormal. To discriminate non-organic dyspnea with asthma, clinicians should pay more attention to emotion, sleep, somatoform symptoms, medical history and so on, and do pulmonary function test, improve the understanding of the characteristics of the two diseases, decrease misdiagnosis and wrong diagnosis.

Key words: dyspnea, asthma, anxiety, depression, insomnia