What are the causes of chronic cough in children? How to use medicine for chronic cough in children

If a child has health problems, parents will be particularly anxious. If a child has a chronic cough for a long time, they must actively go to a regular hospital for examination and treatment. Generally, a child's chronic cough may be related to bronchitis or allergic dry cough. Once diagnosed, it should be actively treated with medication to recover.

Children have weak immune systems, which leads to many diseases. One of them is the most common cough in daily life. Many parents do not know the cause of chronic cough in children, which can easily delay treatment and affect the health of children. So what are the causes of chronic cough in children?

1. The cause of chronic cough is cough variant asthma

It is a special type of asthma, with cough as its main symptom. This type of asthma is easily ignored by people because it has no obvious symptoms of wheezing and chest tightness, so it is easy to be misdiagnosed, delay the disease, and miss the best time for treatment.

Cough and airway hyperresponsiveness often exist at the same time. Some children may have transient increased airway responsiveness after respiratory tract infection. Cough and airway hyperresponsiveness are independent physiological reflexes.

2. Asthma and chronic cough in children

3. Cough

Cough is one of the main symptoms of asthma, and asthma cannot be diagnosed based solely on cough. Recent literature confirms that most children with isolated cough do not have asthma due to the lack of typical asthma-like inflammatory changes and low response to hormone treatment.

4. Upper airway cough syndrome (UACS)

The main causes are infection, allergic rhinitis, sinusitis, etc. Rhinitis/sinusitis is not uncommon in older children, often manifested by throat itching, pain, cough, mucopurulent sputum, and some children have a sense of secretion flowing in the throat; physical examination shows hyperplasia of pharyngeal lymphoid follicles, which may appear cobblestone-like.

5. Psychogenic cough

It is more common in children and adolescents. The characteristic is that there is no cough after falling asleep, and there are often anxiety symptoms. The characteristic goose-like cough or dog-like cough in children is helpful for diagnosis, which is not uncommon in clinical practice.

6. TIC and cough in children

The use of stimulants to control attention deficit disorder in children is increasing, and many patients are prone to tics. Stimulants (such as Ritalin) are believed to aggravate or induce tics, which can manifest as a nonspecific dry cough in children.

7. Foreign body inhalation in children

Foreign body inhalation may occur in children. About 50% of children have no witnesses when they inhale foreign bodies, and 20% of children do not seek medical treatment until more than a week after foreign body inhalation.

8. Congenital respiratory diseases

Mainly seen in infants. Chronic cough is caused by a variety of reasons, such as laryngeal tracheobronchial softening and stenosis; vascular ring compression; tracheoesophageal fistula inhalation; ciliary dyskinesia.