title: Patterns of cough in the clinic.
abstract: Current guidelines for the management of cough highlight the value of a taking a careful history to establish specific features of the cough in particular its duration, typical triggers or aggravants and associated symptoms. Unfortunately the diagnostic yield from a history alone is poor and there is a need to understand the pattern of clinical cough in a more precise way. As the technology to record cough in ambulatory settings becomes more sophisticated so the possibility that precise measurement of the cough frequency, intensity and acoustic characteristics may offer diagnostically valuable information in individual patients becomes a reality. In this article the current knowledge of the clinical patterns of cough is discussed and the potential for new technology to record cough patterns in a meaningful way is considered.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Infection & Immunity, School of Medicine, Dentistry & Biomedical Sciences, Queen's University Belfast, Health Sciences Building, 97 Lisburn Road, Belfast BT9 7BL, Ireland. l.mcgarvey@qub.ac.uk
authors.forename: L P A
authors.initials: LP
authors.lastname: McGarvey
mesh_terms: D000553:Ambulatory Care / Q000379:methods*; D000818:Animals; D020811:Biomedical Technology; D003371:Cough / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic