Originally published November 7 2005
Mayo clinic discovers a new source of chronic cough
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A study performed at the Mayo Clinic found that one third of patients with chronic cough were found to have sinusitis after being given a CT scan, suggesting a possible area of improvement for diagnosing the condition.
This study suggests that sinusitis is more common than we had previously thought in people with chronic cough," says Kaiser Lim, M.D., lead researcher and Mayo Clinic pulmonologist and allergist.
"It also confirms our impression in the chronic cough clinic that many of our patients have underlying sinus inflammation as a cause of their coughs.
Physicians had obtained CT scans for 132 of these patients suspected of having sinusitis, with significantly abnormal results indicating sinusitis in 49 patients, or 37.1 percent.
The more severe the sinus abnormalities found in the CT scans, the more likely the patients were to be ultimately diagnosed with sinusitis as the cause of chronic cough.
The chronic cough patients Dr. Lim studied had been coughing for an average of 52 months.
"The diagnosis had not been made for over four years -- and the shame of it is that many of the people had been coughing due to something you could potentially treat," says Dr. Lim.
In addition, many patients in Dr. Lim's study had been told by their physicians to learn to live with their coughs.
"It's also not unusual for chronic coughers to simply give up on getting a diagnosis and treatment for the underlying problem and resign themselves to live with the coughing," says Dr. Lim.
To determine whether sinusitis might be the underlying cause of a patient's chronic cough, a patient should undergo a complete ear, nose and throat evaluation including rhinoscopy -- a nasal passage exam using a tiny flexible fiberoptic scope -- and/or a CT scan of the sinuses, according to Dr. Lim.
Previously, physicians have often lumped sinusitis and its symptoms together with postnasal drip syndrome from rhinitis as a potential cause of chronic cough, says Dr. Lim.
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