Does home oxygen benefit people with chronic heart failure?

Does oxygen therapy reduce breathlessness? Although intractable breathlessness is the most common reason for prescribing home oxygen therapy for patients with chronic heart failure, evidence is mounting that supplemental oxygen does not reduce breathlessness. A large observational study of patients with breathlessness of varying aetiology concluded that oxygen therapy was of no benefit in the absence of hypoxaemia, a finding echoed in a Cochrane review of eight randomised trials of oxygen therapy. A recent randomised, double blind controlled study confirmed that oxygen was no better than room air for the relief of intractable breathlessness in study participants, a few of whom had chronic heart failure. In a small physiological study of 12 patients with chronic heart failure, exercise capacity (used as a surrogate for breathlessness) improved with supplemental oxygen, but the finding has not been replicated.