ERS 2024: Is there a relationship between real-time continuous cough monitoring and subjective cough assessment?
Summary
A 30-day study of 12 chronic cough patients found no correlation between daily cough counts (median: 93/day) measured by the Hyfe CoughMonitor and symptom severity assessed via the Cough VAS. Further research is needed to identify better endpoints for evaluating chronic cough treatments.
Introduction: Real-time continuous cough monitoring using wearable technology is a novel technique of quantifying disease severity in patients with chronic cough. Little is known about how daily objective cough count measured by such devices correlates with subjective assessment of symptoms in cough patients.
Methods: Patients with chronic cough were monitored the Hyfe CoughMonitor for 30 consecutive days and concomitantly recorded daily cough severity scores using the Cough Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). Objective cough count data collected was recorded and correlated with daily VAS scores.
Results: 12 Patients recorded a median of 93 coughs per day (range 3-637) with a mean (SD) cough VAS score of 43mm (24mm). There was no significant association between daily cough count and daily cough VAS score in any of the patients. Scatter plots demonstrating these relationships can be visualised in Figure 1 and the Pearson correlation coefficients can be seen in Table 1.
Conclusions: There is no association between daily objective cough counts and daily cough VAS scores, more work is required to find the optimal endpoint for responses to treatment for chronic cough.
