Male: A lot of people think, my kids started asthmatic because he does wheeze but he coughs but isn’t coughing a criteria that I can control?
Dr. Marcus: In childhood asthma, coughing is just as important as wheezing and can be considered our early warning sign. When patients begin to have inflammation in the lungs from their asthma, the cough is the first sign of this inflammation. As the inflammation leads to more bronchus spasm the cough will advance to a wheeze. There is no point in waiting until the child actually wheezes, in fact we recommend that you begin your asthma therapy or escalate your asthma therapy the minute you start hearing coughing in that child. By doing this you will short circuit that more severe asthma episode avoiding that emergency trip to the physician’s office or to the emergency room as well as avoiding the hospitalization that sometimes ensues.
Male: Isn’t coughing sort of like saying, something is stuck in the lung, and maybe this case here, you try to force it out of the lung a little bit?
Dr. Marcus: Coughing is a response to an abnormal condition in the lungs. If the lungs are plugged with mucus, spasm, inflammation, which are blocking air, so called air trapping, the patient will cough as a response to that condition and that is in fact one of the early signs of an asthma episode.
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