Cough, whether dry or wet, is the body’s reaction to foreign bodies or harmful substances, bacteria in the respiratory tract. But sometimes this useful reflex brings excruciating pain in the chest or larynx, so the desire to get rid of it is quite normal for any person.
Many faces cough
Cough is classified according to several principles:
- by nature: dry and productive (wet, with sputum production);
- by duration: acute (no more than 3 weeks), lingering (no more than 3 months) and chronic.
In fact, coughing is not a separate or independent disease, it is only a symptom of a disease. Therefore, medications prescribed by doctors are primarily aimed at combating the causes. The most unpleasant and difficult to tolerate is a dry choking cough. What to do to get rid of it can be found out only after determining the disease accompanying it.
Causes of Dry Cough
Influenza and parainfluenza are the two main diseases that accompany dry asphyxiating cough. In the early days, it is supplemented by pain in the chest and pharynx, and only then it becomes wet, with outgoing sputum.
- A suffocating cough at night is a clear sign of inflammation in the larynx (laryngitis) or in the throat (pharyngitis). Untimely treatment of these diseases in the “kit” with cool inhaled air, vapors or gases can lead to chronic tracheitis.
- Night suffocating cough is often the result of post-nasal congestion. It is provoked by a runny nose when the fluid that is released from the nose and sinuses flows down the walls of the pharynx and irritates the cough receptors located there. Although the cough looks productive, it is actually dry.
Causes of dry cough accompanied by severe pain
- Dry, suffocating cough, accompanied by acute chest pain,may be a messenger of croupous pneumonia. In this case, pain is felt on the part of the patient lung.
- Also, these signs can signal more serious health problems, for example, pleurisy (pneumonia) or tumors. Often an additional symptom of these diseases is shortness of breath and fever.
- Dry choking cough, accompanied by severe pain in the chest area, may indicate the presence of tumors of the mediastinum (heart, bronchi, aorta, etc.), as well as heart failure and other diseases of the cardiovascular system.
Dry choking cough and childhood illness
With special attention you need to treat children's dry cough. Because often he accompanies a disease such as whooping cough. By its nature, such a cough is convulsive, angry, sometimes ending with vomiting. Note that with whooping cough, expectorants or mucolytics are not prescribed: drugs are used to calm the nervous system and relieve cough. Dry cough, in addition to fever, vomiting, rash, can be accompanied by measles and false croup.