>< General Considerations
Cough adversely affects personal and work-related interactions, disrupts sleep, and often causes discomfort of the throat and chest wall. Most people medical attention for acute cough desire symptom relief; few are worried about serious illness. Cough results from stimulation of mechanical or chemical afferent nerve receptors in the bronchial tree. Effective cough depends on an intact afferent-efferent reflex arc, adequate expiratory and chest wall muscle strength, and normal muscociliary production and clearance.
>< Clinical Findings
In healthy adults, most adults cough syndromes are due to viral respiratory tract infections.
Additional features of infection such as fever, nasal congestion, and sore throat help confirms that diagnosis. Dyspnea (At rest or with exertion) may reflect a more serious condition, and further evaluation should include assessment of oxygenation (pulse oximetry or arterial blood gas measurement), airflow (peak-flow or spectrometry), and pulmonary parenchymal disease (chest radiogeraphy). The timing and character of the cough have not been found to very useful in establishing the cause of acute cough syndromes, although cough-variant asthma should be considered in adults with prominent nocturnal cough, and persistent cough with phlegm increases the patient's likelihood of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
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