EP 13: Cough reflex testing with Emma Wallace

Coughing and swallowing are two important functions, both providing airway protection and therefore being essential for survival. However, as students and clinicians we usually learn a lot more about swallowing than about coughing. And often, evaluating the cough function in the dysphagia assessment goes down with simply asking the patient to cough and subjectively assessing the effectiveness of the cough through listening to its quality. For this reason we invited Dr. Emma Wallace to speak about her recently published spotlight article on cough reflex testing in clinical dysphagia practice (Wallace, Huckabee & Macrae, 2022). She explains what coughing is, what different types there are and when and how we can test it.

Helpful literature

• Morice et al. (2007). ERS guidelines on the assessment of cough. https://doi.org/10.1183/09031936.00101006
• Troche et al. (2014). A framework for understanding shared substrates of airway protection. https://doi.org/10.1590/1678-775720140132