Cough in patients after stroke

To the Editors: Ward et al. 1 are to be congratulated on their new and important findings concerning cough in patients after stroke. They measured a large number of ventilatory parameters during voluntary and reflex cough, and compared the values in stroke patients and healthy controls. Although the relationship of voluntary cough after stroke with the risk of aspiration has been analysed extensively, this seem to be the first detailed study of reflex cough, induced in these experiments by tartaric acid aerosol. This is important because, should material be …