Can a placebo reduce the urge to cough?

The desire to cough after inhaling the spicy substance in chili peppers can be soothed by a placebo, suggesting that coughing can be controlled by more sophisticated thought centers in the brain, according to a small new study.

Stuart Mazzone, of the University of Queensland in Australia, and colleagues found that, on average, people given a placebo had 45 percent less of an urge to cough when inhaling capsaicin than they did when they did not receive placebo.

"It's as if the brain has some occasion to control when to cough or not," said Omer Van den Bergh, a professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium, who was not involved in this study.

Ronald Eccles, the director of the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University in the U.K., said that the study supports earlier work that placebos work just about as well to reduce coughing as anti-cough medicines.

"I think the key point is that if patients believe in a cough treatment then it does work for them," Eccles told Reuters Health by email.

ANESTHETIC VS. IRRITANT

An emerging idea among cough researchers is that coughing is not only a simple reflex, but is regulated by other areas of the brain that can be influenced by expectations that a substance can soothe the cough.

Mazzone's group sought to understand whether a placebo could also influence the urge to cough, which is the perception of irritation in the airways that precedes coughing.

Most natural remedies for persistent cough

Remedy No. 1. Learn how to cough only through the nose (i.e., with your mouth closed all the time). It will help you to reduce irritation of airways and bronchospasm, and increase oxygen levels in body cells and the brain.

Remedy No. 2. After you have mastered Remedy No. 1 (it may take 1-2 days), learn how to cough with the mouth and nose closed. You simply need to keep the mouth closed and the nose pinched. This will further increase your body and brain oxygenation.

These 2 easiest remedies are often sufficient to stop or reduce bouts of persistent coughing and gradually to recover. However, you can subdue coughing even faster if you use the most potent anti-coughing breathing exercise called "reduced breathing".

Remedy No. 3. Sit down in a comfortable position, preferably at an ordinary table on a straight chair. While having the bout of coughing, try your best to relax and at the end of your usual exhalation, pinch your nose and hold your breath (the mouth should be closed all the time) until you experience moderate discomfort.

If you cannot hold your breath due to severe coughing, pinch your nose and keep mouth closed while coughing without any air exchange. Why? Your goal is to increase the CO2 content in your airways so that you calm down the cough receptor-cells that become irritated due to several mechanical and biochemical factors during acute coughing bouts. These nerve cells stimulate the breathing centre in the brain both to initiate and to continue coughing.