Clinical approach to the coughing adult patient

You will learn:
• Cough, even acute cough lasting less than three weeks, adversely affects sleep, overall quality of life and can lead to fatigue, chest pain and headaches
• Coughing is a protective mechanism; the pathophysiology of cough involves not only a reflex response, but a central regulating and upper-brain modulating response. This latter involvement can cause unpleasant side-effects, such as anxiety, and be socially distressing to patients
• Diagnosing and treating the cause of cough is essential to achieving positive clinical outcomes
• New and emerging entities include the chronic cough of long-COVID and the newly described discrete disease of chronic cough, which occurs without other respiratory comorbidities; these entities are very distressing to the patient’s quality of life and are leading to the development of new agents such as P2X3 inhibitors.