Research

Analysis and evaluation of environmental tobacco smoke exposure as a risk factor for chronic cough

Beatrix Groneberg-Kloft¹ , Wojciech Feleszko² , Quoc Thai Dinh³ , Anke van Mark⁴ , Elke Brinkmann⁵ , Dirk Pleimes¹ and Axel Fischer¹

¹  Division of Allergy Research, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Free University and Humboldt-University, D-13353 Berlin, Germany

²  Department of Pediatric Pneumology and Allergy, The Medical University Children's Hospital, PL-01-184 Warsaw, Poland

³  Department of Medicine, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Free University and Humboldt-University, D-13353 Berlin, Germany

⁴  Institute of Occupational Medicine, University zu Lübeck, D-23538 Lübeck, Germany

⁵  Department of Prevention, Norddeutsche Metall-Berufsgenossenschaft, D-30173 Hannover, Germany

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Cough 2007, 3:6doi:10.1186/1745-9974-3-6

Published:	2 May 2007

Abstract

Exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and active tobacco smoking has been shown to increase symptoms of bronchial asthma such as bronchoconstriction but effects on other respiratory symptoms remain poorly assessed. Current levels of exposure to tobacco smoke may also be responsible for the development of chronic cough in both children and adults. The present study analyses the effects of tobacco smoke exposure as potential causes of chronic cough. A panel of PubMed-based searches was performed relating the symptom of cough to various forms of tobacco smoke exposure. It was found that especially prenatal and postnatal exposures to ETS have an important influence on children's respiratory health including the symptom of cough. These effects may be prevented if children and pregnant women are protected from exposure to ETS. Whereas the total number of studies adressing the relationship between cough and ETS exposure is relatively small, the present study demonstrated that there is a critical amout of data pointing to a causative role of environmental ETS exposure for the respiratory symptom of cough. Since research efforts have only targeted this effect to a minor extent, future epidemiological and experimental studies are needed to further unravel the relation between ETS and cough.