Hyperventilation: the tip and the iceberg.

OVER THE PAST decade, some 700 cases of the hyperventilation syndrome have been studied in the respiratory physiology department of Papworth Hospital. 82 per cent had no detectable pathology. The remainder had well documented pathological states, but their symptoms were largely or entirely related to overbreathing. This survey does not include a very considerable number of patients in whom hyperventilation was present, but who also had organic disease of sufficient severity to produce symptoms; e.g. cardiac infarction.