Do you have the Mystery Chronic Cough?

Check out this article we found written by Dr. Christopher Chang from the Fauenquier.com Where he explains to us why people suffer from Chronic Dry Cough: 

 The Mystery Chronic Cough (a.k.a. habit cough, tic cough, psychogenic cough, irritable larynx syndrome)

There are patients with a mysterious chronic dry cough (longer than 6 months) that seems to defy all explanation and resist all the usual standard treatments. Some of these patients have coughed for more than ten years resulting in frustration not only in terms of treatment, but diagnosis. Often, patients are told their cough is due to reflux, allergy, asthma, infection, aspiration, virus, etc and undergo numerous exams and studies including pulmonary function tests, chest x-rays, reflux studies, barium swallows, upper endoscopy, CT scans, MRI scans, etc. Even all medications known to cause a cough as a side effect (ie, statins, ACE Inhibitors and Angiotensin Receptor Blockers) are removed to no avail. More often than not, all these medical studies come back normal. Furthermore, proposed treatments with antibiotics, proton pump inhibitors, allergy medications, cough suppressants, steroid inhalers, etc are not successful. Surgery may even be performed which also fails to improve the cough. Eventually, some are even told it’s all in their head (psychogenic cough, habit cough, tic cough, etc) or idiopathic.

 A typical patient with the chronic cough is described as follows:

Started during or after recovering from a viral laryngitis and/or upper respiratory infection

Dry cough

Cough occurs due to no perceivable reason…perhaps only a tickle

Cough may occur several times an hour to even as often as several times a minute. Must be distinguished from whooping cough (severe attacks of a choking cough that lasts 1-2 minutes often with near vomiting and appearance of suffocation. Watch Mayo Clinic video).

Cough does not seem to get better with time (months or even years)

  

Interested in reading the rest of this article? Simple click on the link below:

http://fauquierent.net/cough.htm