Can A Persistent Cough Be Linked To Your Heart?
With a cough often originating from our respiratory systems, it is difficult to associate a cough with an underlying heart condition.
To draw the association, it is key to understand that a lot of our internal functions are interconnected. When something fails to function optimally, it may impact the function of another system within our bodies, often the ones closest to it. For the heart, the most common premise under which a persistent cough is observed is when the heart is in failure.
Making The Connect: Your Heart and A Cough
Several conditions can result in a heart that is functioning suboptimally. A few include infections, genetic conditions, myocardial infarction, and coronary artery disease. Lifestyle conditions such as diabetes and obesity can also contribute to a heart that doesn’t function well.
Inversely, conditions that affect lung function such as COPD, pneumonia, or occupational lung diseases can contribute towards heart failure. The cause for this is the suboptimal function of the lungs that results in a heart that has to work twice as hard to facilitate the movement of oxygenated blood around the body. This can result in heart failure over time.
When the heart is in failure, the heart is unable to pump blood efficiently to the rest of the body. This is when the blood pools backward into the lungs. Since it is a natural response of the respiratory system to clear out anything that is clogging up the airways, pulmonary congestion results in a cough that can become persistent over time.
Evaluating the Cardiac Cough
Coughing due to an underlying heart condition is a sign that is observed late in the disease course. Often by this stage, a diagnosis for heart failure has already taken place. Treatment initiatives have often been initiated. A cough is often an indication that treatment strategies that are being explored are either inadequate or inefficient.
Due to the collection of fluid in the lungs, a cardiac cough is often a wet frothy cough. Frequent coughing and its impact on the lungs can result in blood-tinged sputum as well. Along with cough, patients with heart failure may also report a heaviness in the chest, difficulty breathing, and a bubbling feeling within their chest.
Additional features that can be observed with a cardiac cough, is that the cough can be dry when persistent, without the production of sputum. Many individuals may also report coughing at night. And this primarily occurs due to the increased tendency of the fluid to accumulate in the lungs after laying down.
Watching Out For The Red Flag Signs
With heart disease, cough could be a red flag sign. It is an indication that the disease condition has progressed and is affecting other systems in the body.
Patients with heart disease may also observe difficulty with breathing, swelling in their extremities, fatigue, and generalized weakness. Overall with the lowering of the heart function, there can be progressive difficulty with optimum day-to-day function.
At this point, patients with heart failure are advised to check back in with their healthcare provider to understand what the potential next steps in management would be.
The Future of Heart Health and the Chronic Cough
Essentially any system dysfunction can lead to the manifestation of a wide range of possible symptoms. Studies have indicated that symptoms such as a chronic cough are often linked with comorbid conditions which can include diabetes, hypertension, or angina, for which several of these increase a person’s cardiovascular risk.
Other reports from studies have also backtracked a link between a chronic cough as a risk factor for myocardial infarction. This is due to the factors that contribute towards the development of a cough, possible inflammatory mediators, accelerating the potential of developing an MI.
Anti-hypertensive medications, such as angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs) also have the potential of causing a cough as an adverse effect. ACEIs are cardioprotective drugs. They are also used to manage heart failure. Which indicates that both symptoms and adverse effects can overlap.
Moving forward there is still a lot more to understand on the links between heart health and a chronic cough. On its own, coughing has always been linked to a respiratory condition. But, the requirement for further investigation, especially in patients with comorbidities is crucial. To tackle a lot of these nuances with a simple cough, it would be vital to track a cough along with other signs that tag along with it.
Tracking signs also enables user-generated insights into their conditions. This ultimately provides a more holistic future for understanding health conditions that can have overlapping symptoms.
Dr. Michelle Frank is a healthcare consultant working in the FemTech space. Her work centers around building and fostering online women’s health communities. Read more about her latest work here.
