Monitoring cough in clinical practice

How can we monitor cough in clinical practice? Is there a place for questionnaires or cough monitors outside specialist centers, maybe even in general practitioners’ offices?

Imran Satia: That is a very important question because cough is a very common problem. From studies that have been done on observations of the prevalence of cough it can range from about 12% and can go up to 18% to 20% in certain countries.

At the moment we have a couple of ways of subjectively measuring cough. One is questionnaires, and the most commonly used questionnaire that we use in clinical practice is called the Leicester Cough Questionnaire. It is in English, there are 21 questions, and they are split into 3 domains: assessing the impact of cough on somebody’s social life, psychological life, and their physical symptoms. This is a quite important questionnaire that we use in our clinical practice and it can be done in the community by general practitioners in whichever setting.

Another important option, which is a quicker method, is to use the visual analogue scale, which is a 10 cm, or 100 mm, line. We can ask patients, on the scale of severity from 0 to 100 mm, “Please put a vertical line where you think how bad your cough has impacted you.” And sometimes we use this in clinical practice to monitor patients and how they have responded to treatment or if they have not responded to treatment. That is the second way that we often use and has been used in studies as well.

There is a third questionnaire called the cough quality-of-life questionnaire, which is also being used.

These are the tools that we can use in clinical practice, which are subjective measures of cough.