At the start of this slide I would like to introduce you to our new colour scheme. If I need to make it clear how common something is: red means something that is relatively common, black means something that is less common and blue means something that is pretty rare. These are all common so they are all red.Anyway, as dyspnoea worsens the rate and effort increase, but initially the chest and abdomen will still move in and out together. I call this increased abdominal movement to differentiate it from abdominal effort and paradoxical abdominal movement. Abdominal effort is a push on expiration. Because inspiratory abdominal movement is passive, the only phase of respiration that abdominal muscle contraction can help with is expiration. A forced expiration means one of 3 things: small airway disease (which is asthma in cats), very stiff lungs or a fixed (as opposed to dynamic) upper airway obstruction (see later). In virtually all cases there will be increased inspiratory effort as well as the abdominal push.In contrast, paradoxical abdominal movement is when the abdomen goes in, instead of out, inspiration. Read on for more...