Abstract
BackgroundLittle is known of the language healthcare professionals use to describe cough sounds. We aimed to examine how they describe cough sounds and to assess whether these descriptions suggested they appreciate the basic sound qualities (as assessed by acoustic analysis) and the underlying diagnosis of the patient coughing.Methods53 health professionals from two large respiratory tertiary referral centres were recruited; 22 doctors and 31 staff from professions allied to medicine. Participants listened to 9 sequences of spontaneous cough sounds from common respiratory diseases. For each cough they selected patient gender, the most appropriate descriptors and a diagnosis. Cluster analysis was performed to assess which cough sounds attracted similar descriptions.ResultsGender was correctly identified in 93% of cases. The presence or absence of mucus was correct in 76.1% and wheeze in 39.3% of cases. However, identifying clinical diagnosis from cough was poor at 34.0%. Cluster analysis showed coughs with the same acoustics properties rather than the same diagnoses attracted the same descriptions.ConclusionThese results suggest that healthcare professionals can recognise some of the qualities of cough sounds but are poor at making diagnoses from them. It remains to be seen whether in the future cough sound acoustics will provide useful clinical information and whether their study will lead to the development of useful new outcome measures in cough monitoring.
Highlights
Little is known of the language healthcare professionals use to describe cough sounds
Cough is the commonest symptom for which patients seek medical advice [1] but the quality of cough sounds is currently largely ignored in the clinical examination of adults
The cough descriptor choices cause the cough sounds to cluster by acoustic category rather than by diagnostic category. This is the first study to relate the descriptions of adult cough sounds to their acoustic analysis
Summary
Little is known of the language healthcare professionals use to describe cough sounds. We aimed to examine how they describe cough sounds and to assess whether these descriptions suggested they appreciate the basic sound qualities (as assessed by acoustic analysis) and the underlying diagnosis of the patient coughing. Cough is the commonest symptom for which patients seek medical advice [1] but the quality of cough sounds is currently largely ignored in the clinical examination of adults. Like many physical symptoms and signs in clinical medicine the value of assessing the cough sound is unclear. Medical textbooks describe different types of cough (i.e. dry, moist, productive, brassy, hoarse, wheezy, barking etc), implying these terms are of some clinical value. Paediatricians not uncommonly use the diagnostic value of different types of cough [3,4]. Though it is not uncommon to ask an adult patient to describe their cough during clinical assessment,
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