Pharmacological Therapy of Acute and Chronic Cough

A wide range of disease processes may present with cough, and definitive treatment depends on identifying the cause. Specific treatment of the cause should control the cough, but this may not occur in all cases, and in a sizeable proportion of patients, no associated cause can be found. In the settings of acute cough, symptomatic treatment is often the first line of therapy. Symptomatic treatment must be also considered when the cough interferes with the patient’s daily activities; however most of antitussive preparations have not been shown to be more effective than placebo in adequately performed clinical trials. In this chapter the main antitussive drugs are examined, but for the sake of completeness, it is also discussed some other drugs often used to treat cough, though some of them are not commonly classified as antitussive agents. Finally, it is reported a recent therapeutic approach to refractory cough, represented by the combination of behavioural therapy and the neuromodulator drugs.