There are several respiratory symptoms that a patient may have and that, in some cases, are not related to an organic disease.
In this sense, there are patients who believe the gastroenterologist or cardiologist if he tells them that the pain they have in the stomach or chest is due to nerves. However, it is more difficult for patients to understand that the cough is caused by nerves.
What situations can cause coughing?
Coughing can accompany situations of stress, anxiety, hypochondria, nervous depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder, among others. In these cases, after doing the pertinent complementary tests, the doctor does not find the cause of the cough, since the origin of the cough is related to a psychic disorder.
However, many patients associate this type of cough with cold air, the inhalation of irritating odors such as bleach, and the use of personal care products such as hairspray, hairspray, perfumes, etcetera.
Causes of this type of cough
Generally, physicians try to find a pathophysiological explanation for all symptoms. In this sense, they state that this type of cough may be due to a dysfunction or excessive laryngeal hyperreactivity or hypersensitivity.
Who is more predisposed?
From the point of view of daily clinical practice, many of the patients who have this type of cough belong to a certain class: women of postmenopausal age, with other disorders such as depression and fibromyalgia. To a lesser extent, men or women with stress or other personal or family problems, anxiety and hypochondria may be affected by this type of cough.
When taking a medical history, it may be observed that the patient has already suffered symptoms of other organs, which led to visits to the doctor without finding an organic cause for them, or that there has been a case of severe lung disease in a relative or acquaintance who has also started with cough.
What is somatic habit cough?
Cough without a known organic cause is constantly being renamed: habit cough, tic, somatic, nervous, psychogenic… It is usually very noisy or loud, and may make the relative who hears it every day think that it must be something important, but it may also make him think that it could be a “nervous cough”, because he realizes that he coughs less when that person is entertained. It is so intense that it often causes urinary incontinence in women, especially older women. Somatization is the transformation of psychic problems into organic symptoms.
Before making a diagnosis of habit, tic, somatic, psychogenic or nervous cough, physicians must rule out other organic causes of cough.
Therefore, it may be necessary, taking into account the data provided by the patient in the interview, to perform tests to rule out other causes of cough, especially the most frequent and the most transcendental ones. One piece of information from the interview that can help us to think about this type of cough is that at night there are no coughing episodes, something that does not happen in organic diseases.