Question
My child, a 4-month-old boy, has been coughing a bit lately. Sometimes it gets really severe, and he will dry heave, vomiting a lot. Occasionally, he struggles to breathe for one or two minutes and has discharge from his nose. For the past few days, there has been a little runny nose. He also has a light cough, which feels like a sore throat…
Answer
Ten babies out of ten have a cough! Because babies’ respiratory tracts are still fragile and their growth and development are not yet complete, they often suffer from respiratory system diseases when there is the slightest breeze. From a medical perspective, a baby’s cough is a protective reflex action of the body to expel respiratory secretions or foreign bodies. That is to say, coughing is a protective physiological phenomenon in babies. However, if the cough is too severe and interferes with eating, deep sleep, and rest, it loses its protective meaning for the baby. When newborn babies cough again, one should be cautious about conditions such as aspiration pneumonia and congenital lung malformation. Older children generally have coughs due to respiratory tract infections. For pre-school children, coughs should make full use of situations such as respiratory tract infections and foreign bodies in the airways. If a baby coughs in the morning, there’s a high chance it’s a chronic disease, such as chronic upper respiratory inflammation or chronic urethritis. If the baby coughs at night, it might be whooping cough or acute spasmodic laryngitis and other diseases. The act of coughing can be compressed into four actions: short and deep inhalation; glottis locked; diaphragm and intercostal muscles contract, increasing intrapulmonary pressure; glottis opens outward, and the high-pressure air in the lungs is pushed out rapidly under the rapid contraction of the diaphragm. It is these four consecutive actions that make up a complete “cough” process, and why coughs have different qualities, rhythms, sounds, and characteristics. The nature of coughing can be light or irritating coughs: commonly seen in upper respiratory tract infections, tracheitis, pneumonia, urethritis foreign bodies in the airways.