Abstract
Cough is the most common complaint for which patients seek medical attention. Cough variant asthma (CVA) is a form of asthma, which presents solely with cough. CVA is one of the most common causes of chronic cough. More importantly, 30 to 40% of adult patients with CVA, unless adequately treated, may progress to classic asthma. CVA shares a number of pathophysiological features with classic asthma such as atopy, airway hyper-responsiveness, eosinophilic airway inflammation and various features of airway remodeling. Inhaled corticosteroids remain the most important form of treatment of CVA as they improve cough and reduce the risk of progression to classic asthma most likely through their prevention of airway remodeling and chronic airflow obstruction.
Highlights
Cough is a very common complaint for which patients seek medical attention [1, 2]
In “classic asthma” (CA) variable airflow obstruction typically leads to symptoms such as wheeze, dyspnea and cough
Cough in asthma can be classified into three categories cough variant asthma’ (CVA), coughpredominant asthma and cough that persists despite standard therapy with inhaled corticosteroids and bronchodilators [19, 20]
Summary
Cough is a very common complaint for which patients seek medical attention [1, 2]. A number of guidelines defined chronic cough as cough lasting for 8 weeks or longer [1, 3,4,5]. Chronic cough can lead to impaired quality of life [6]. In “classic asthma” (CA) variable airflow obstruction typically leads to symptoms such as wheeze, dyspnea and cough. In ‘variant asthma’ originally described by Glauser in 1972 [7] and subsequently re-named, by Corrao et al [8] as ‘cough variant asthma’ (CVA) cough can be the sole presenting symptom. CVA remains one of the commonest causes of chronic cough worldwide [2, 9]. This review article will discuss various subtypes of asthma and associated eosinophilic airway disorders such as CVA, non-asthmatic eosinophilic bronchitis (NAEB); originally termed eosinophilic bronchitis without asthma and atopic cough [13,14,15,16,17,18,19]
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