Dr Peter Dicpinigaitis on Gender, Ethnic Differences in Chronic Cough

Transcript

Are there ethnic or gender differences when it comes to chronic cough prevalence?

That's the range in question, in regards to chronic cough, because cough is maybe the most sex-specific issue. It's very female predominant in terms of costs. So it's interesting that when you measure cough reflex sensitivity in the lab, women have a more sensitive cough reflex than men, both healthy women compared to healthy men, and female cough patients compared to male cough patients. When we look at who comes to a chronic cough center, okay, those of us that run chronic cough centers around the world put our data together in 2014, and we looked at more than 10,000 patients that we've seen, and that profile was similar to what was earlier shown and that is that two-thirds of the patients seeking help at chronic cough centers are women. So it's very much a female predominant, not female exclusive of course, but female predominant problem with cough. Now in terms of ethnicity, we really haven't seen much there other than to mention the ACE inhibitor cough that previous studies have shown that it's more likely to occur in Chinese individuals than other, the ACE inhibitor induced cough.