{"id":1347,"date":"2018-04-20T08:33:39","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T08:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/besthealth.guide\/?p=1347"},"modified":"2021-10-04T14:22:46","modified_gmt":"2021-10-04T14:22:46","slug":"10-dry-cough-causes-that-will-surprise-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/besthealth.guide\/10-dry-cough-causes-that-will-surprise-you\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Dry Cough Causes That Will Surprise You"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Who hasn’t been there? You have just recovered from a cold, and all symptoms are gone, but that boggling cough just doesn’t seem to go away. It lasts for weeks, sometimes more than a month, and nothing seems to relieve it. Or perhaps, you haven’t been sick at all. One day you just wake up coughing and no matter what you do it doesn’t go away.<\/p>\n

A dry cough is very rarely a sign of a serious condition but it can be very bothersome and affect the quality of your sleep if it wakes you up in the middle of the night. In order to get rid of your cough, you need to identify the cause of it. And you would be surprised at some of the reasons why that cough isn’t leaving you. Here is a list of not very commonly known causes of a dry cough that will surprise you.<\/p>\n

1. Heating<\/h3>\n

This one is very counterintuitive because people are used to associating coughing<\/a> with symptoms of a cold, and therefore, with low temperatures. However, not all coughs are caused by a cold room or walking out in cold weather, but instead, by warm air. How is that possible? What few people know is that hot and dry air can irritate our airways, and when the inner tissue of our throat becomes irritated we have a coughing reflex.<\/p>\n

When we turn on our heating system, we change the humidity and temperature of the air, and if our throat isn’t used to it, it can be affected. Moreover, dust and dirt often accumulate on our stoves and heaters during the warm months, and when we first turn them on during the autumn all that dirt is pushed up by the rising hot air and gets disseminated around the room. When we breathe it, we can get a cough.<\/p>\n

\"\"2. Gastric reflux<\/h3>\n

In order to digest our food, our stomach produces acid fluids that dissolve all we eat. Ideally, that acidic mix shouldn’t go up to our esophagus, because it can burn the inside of it and hurt it. The same thing happens if for some reason that acidic fluid goes up to our throat or our mouth. Healthy stomachs have a superior sphincter called the pylorus, that only opens when we swallow or throw up, and the rest of the time stays closed so what is inside the stomach stays inside the stomach. When the pylorus fails, the movement of our stomach may push its content upwards, causing a number of problems.<\/p>\n

Gastric reflux can cause dry cough because our throat is irritated by the acid from the stomach that reaches it chronically. If you have a persistent dry cough but have other symptoms of gastric reflux such as heartburn<\/a> and regurgitation (food or liquid popping back in your mouth after you have swallowed it), then you should get checked to confirm a possible digestive problem.<\/p>\n

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3. Asthma<\/h3>\n

People associate asthma<\/a> with its most common symptom, which is also the most dramatic one: the difficulty to breathe as if your chest was closed or pressed from the outside. However, some variations of asthma may have a variety of symptoms, including dry cough. There are cases where people cough as a reflex, an attempt by the body to breathe and clear out the airways; in other cases, the irritation caused by an allergic reaction linked to asthma can trigger the coughing reflex.<\/p>\n

There is a type of asthma called cough variant asthma, and its main symptom is a persistent dry cough. Other symptoms of asthma, besides the universally known difficulty to breathe, is a generalized weakness or fatigue. If you have a persistent dry cough caused by asthma, chances are your breathing capacity is actually reduced, but you have become used to it without knowing, so you don’t notice.<\/p>\n

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4. Lung or heart disease<\/h3>\n

Aside from asthma, which is a chronic condition that in most cases is suffered from infancy, other lung conditions, or malfunctions that you can get at a later stage of your life can also cause a dry cough. The risk here is that, when there is no other symptom noticed by the person, they might mistakenly believe that the cause of their problem is in their throat itself, or viral infection at most, and the underlying cause remains undetected.<\/p>\n

For example, some lung problems such as pneumothorax<\/a> can cause a dry cough. Pneumothorax happens when the lung collapses, often after an injury, and the body produces a coughing reflex in an attempt to increase breathing capacity. Lung cancer might also cause a dry cough in a number of cases. The vagal reflex that causes the dry cough can also be triggered by heart insufficiency; in this case, it is common to appreciate a pink foam in your spit.<\/p>\n

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5. An inhaled or swallowed object<\/h3>\n

Believe it or not, sometimes your cough is caused by a small object or substance that you have inhaled and is stuck in your throat. Bigger objects are very easy to notice and, even if we don’t go as far as choaking, we can feel them inside our throat and try to cough<\/a>, swallow and even vomit in order to clear it out of our throat. However, very small objects are extremely difficult to notice, like a strand of hair of a very small splinter.<\/p>\n

However, they still trigger the coughing reflex because they stimulate the receptors located in our throats. In most cases, we can get rid of those objects by drinking some liquid that can wash it down, but if it gets stuck in our throat’s inner tissue, they can be more difficult to remove by yourself and instead require medical intervention.<\/p>\n

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6. Postnasal drip<\/h3>\n

The purpose of the mucus in our nose and throat is to protect our airways from irritants, objects, and other substances that could get inside them through our nostrils<\/a> and our mouth. It also cleans the airways from infectious agents such as viruses and bacteria.<\/p>\n

We normally produce a small quantity of mucus that covers our airways as a protective layer, and it is thick enough to stay in place and accomplish its purpose. However, for different reasons, sometimes this mucus is more liquid than it should be, so it isn’t consistent enough to stay in place, and slowly drips backward towards our throat due to the effect of the gravity.<\/p>\n

This liquid can tickle our throat and trigger our coughing reflex. Since it is a process that happens inside our airways because of its own secretions, the coughing caused by postnasal drip isn’t triggered by any Ambiental factor or infection, and thus is more difficult to identify.<\/p>\n

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\"\"7. A side effect of medication<\/h3>\n

Most people don’t even read the list of side effects described in any medication’s prospect, but in some cases, a dry cough can be among them. Certain chemicals<\/a> can produce a dry cough response that will last for as long as the medication itself is being taken. Several types of medication might cause this response, but the most common are blood pressure and heart disease medications.<\/p>\n

As you can see, these are very serious conditions that require you to take your medicines, and the dry cough, however bothersome it may be, is a side effect that isn’t, by any stretch of the word, as bad as what would happen if you didn’t take your medication at all. Sometimes you will just have to endure it for as long as you take the medication. However, if this side effect affects your life too much and you don’t want to take it, ask your doctor for possible alternate treatment.<\/p>\n

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8. Cigarette smoke<\/h3>\n

Everyone is nowadays more or less aware of the fact that smoking is bad for our health, but not all of them fully understand the many consequences that inhaling tobacco<\/a> smoke can have on our system. Most symptoms of smoking tobacco are respiratory, of course, because our airways and lungs are in direct contact with the literally hundreds and hundreds of different toxic chemicals that are contained in your everyday tobacco cigarette.<\/p>\n

They damage the cells on the surface of your airways and actually change their shape and texture, killing some of their components and forcing a defensive rearrangement and transformation of said cells. Cigarette smoke can irritate our throat, even if we are not the ones who are smoking. Secondhand smoke is just as dangerous as firsthand smoke, and the lasting damage it inflicts our throats can cause a persistent dry cough that lasts for long.<\/p>\n

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9. Pneumonia<\/h3>\n

Just as it happens with asthma, pneumonia is a generally well-known lung disease that few people know can actually cause a dry cough. Unlike asthma, which is caused by an allergic reaction to certain factors in the air, pneumonia<\/a> is the result of an infection, and for that reason, is treated with antibiotics and can be cured in a matter of weeks.<\/p>\n

Cough associated with pneumonia is often productive, which means that you cough out phlegm, sometimes with blood. However, there is a variant of pneumonia, called mycoplasma pneumonia, also known as atypical pneumonia, that causes a dry cough. It is most common in people under 40 years old and can be detected with an X-ray or a throat swab.<\/p>\n

You should suspect that your dry cough has an infectious cause if you develop other symptoms of infection, especially fever. Go visit a doctor if you suspect you might have a lung infection.<\/p>\n

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10. Viral infections<\/h3>\n

Colds<\/a> are in many cases caused by viruses, and dry cough, as well as productive cough, are among the most common symptoms. However, after a cold is cured, which often happens within a week of the first symptoms manifesting, a dry cough can be very persistent, as well as other signs of throat irritation such as dysphonia. The reason for this is that a viral infection, once cured, can leave the cells of your throat more sensitive.<\/p>\n

Environmental agents such as dust, dryness, smoke, and temperature changes, that caused no reaction in you otherwise, might cause you to cough because of this increased sensitivity. Dry cough caused by a previous viral infection can last for as long as two months after the initial infection has been completely cured. You can do things to ease the irritation of your throat, such as drinking warm liquid such as tea, or milk with honey.<\/p>\n\r\n

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