Every Emergency Physician who has worked a night shift knows this all too well – the child brought to the ED in the middle of the night for a cough, keeping the entire family up, and the cough has been going on for weeks.
And, the not-at-all-satisfying answer: “This is pretty normal.”
This is yet another publication describing the natural history of symptoms following an upper respiratory illness. These authors in Australia enrolled children evaluated in the Emergency Department for an upper respiratory infection featuring cough. They enrolled 839 children and attempted to follow them for four weeks after the index visit, as well as through follow-up with a pulmonology specialist if seen for persistent, unresolving cough. Nearly 300 of the initially enrolled cohort was lost to follow-up over the course of the month, but of those who were contacted, two-thirds still had cough at 7 days, and a quarter were still coughing at day 21. Ultimately 171 – or 20.4% – were still coughing at day 28 and eligible for pulmonologist evaluation. Of these, about a third were identified to have a previously undiagnosed underlying chronic respiratory disorder (asthma, bronchiectasis, etc.) and about half were given the diagnosis of persistent bacterial bronchitis.
The general takeaway here is that coughs generally linger – but once a cough has persisted beyond 2-3 weeks, it is reasonable to consider alternative precipitating diagnoses other than the initial URI.
“Chronic cough postacute respiratory illness in children: a cohort study”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28814419