Question: My daughter is 8. For the past couple of years she has had an intermittent occurrence of gasping, like taking deep heaving breaths. Until recently this never occurred more than once a month or so. It was episodic, lasted for a couple of hours, and usually was noted when she was bored. She is the youngest and can be pretty dramatic, so we initially assumed it was an attention thing. Also, she described the problem as not being able to "feel my breath going in my throat" which I explained no one feels and thought perhaps she was simply reacting to some childish belief that she should feel something more as she breathed.
The past week she has started doing this consistently. She says she gets dizzy. She says she needs to stand up to breathe because she can't breathe right while sitting down. She has used the terms "pins and needles," and "heavy" to describe how her chest feels. She has said that she doesn't feel like she is getting enough air.
She is still very physically active and the physical exertion seems to have no ill-affect on her breathing. She doesn't wheeze like an asthmatic, just gulps air every few inhalations.
We took her to the doctor today and got a chest X-Ray which the doctor said looked good. They did a blood test to check for possible anemia (she is not much of a meat eater though I thought she compensated well with broccoli for iron.) If neither the chest x-ray nor the blood tests for anemia give us an answer, is there any other physical cause I should look at ruling out? I know some heart problems can do this, but her pulse/ox was perfect and I would think if she had some sort of congenital heart problem there would be low oxygenation. Am I wrong in assuming that? Her BP was normal, weight and height normal, and the doctor said her respiration sounded fine.
Another possibility is we have definitely had some stressors. She has moved away from friends twice in the past year and for 18 months I was working a 7-day week. Her increased breathing issues *do* coincide with me being given a respite (a normal five day week) and we have been spending considerably more time together. I wonder if it may be an anxiety reaction; counterintuitively, maybe she fears losing that time with me or is seeking greater attention now that I have the time to give it. Her description sounds like when I have near-panic attacks. So I am open to the possibility that there is no physical cause, but I want to rule out any and all of them before simply chalking it up to stress or melodrama.

Thanks. If the anemia test comes back okay, I'll follow up with an echocardiograph.
Could you give me a bit of clarification about somatization disorder? How would we be able to tell the difference between this and a panic attack? If I understand correctly, the somatization disorder would be where she is actually experiencing the symptoms, but there is no underlying physical cause, as opposed to if this is just attention-seeking, or an actual panic attack, is that right? I'm wondering how we would know the difference. Is this something a psychologist could determine, or is it even something we should place that much emphasis on?