Attending to Patients Who Present to the Facility with a Cough Responding to Evelyn

Thank you for your post. As a nurse working in the primary care setting, it is common to attend to patients who present to the facility with a cough. The presented cough can be categorized as either acute, subacute, or chronic. Cough in elderly patients may result from single or multiple causes that may lead to various types of chronic cough. The diagnosing nurse practitioner (NP) should focus on the presented symptoms, the underlying factors, and related bacteria to differentiate the type of chronic cough. A good differential diagnosis of cough in elderly patients is a prerequisite to the development of a patient-centered treatment and cough control therapies, as well as planning for future cough control (Morice et al., 2020). Failing to correctly diagnose and control chronic cough in elderly patients can lead to cough-related complications such as loss of speech and poor health-related quality of life (HRQoL) outcomes. Hire our assignment writing services in case your assignment is devastating you.

References

Morice, A. H., Millqvist, E., Bieksiene, K., Birring, S. S., Dicpinigaitis, P., Ribas, C. D., Boon, M. H., Kantar, A., Lai, K., McGarvey, L., Rigau, D., Satia, I., Smith, J., Song, W. J., Tonia, T., van den Berg, J. W. K., van Manen, M. J. G., & Zacharasiewicz, A. (2020). ERS guidelines on the diagnosis and treatment of chronic cough in adults and children. European Respiratory Journal, 55(1). https://doi.org/10.1183/13993003.01136-2019

Responding to Graciela

This is a good post, Graciela. Attending to a patient presenting with chronic cough with known risk factors such as smoking and a history of cough can help narrow down the diagnosis of the chronic cough. However, having a history of diagnosed HTN and manifesting other related complications such as frequent urination and suspected benign prostatic hyperplasia and diabetes can complicate the diagnosis. This will require a differential diagnosis focusing on chronic cough, diabetes, and urinary tract infections. Research focused on patients with COVID-19 has shown that comorbid chronic diseases increase the severity of chronic respiratory diseases (Liu et al., 2020). Additionally, despite properly managing chronic cough and treating other related chronic diseases and underlying factors, the disease can persist without any known cause. The chronic refractory cough can be symptomatically diagnosed using neuromodulators and managed with gabapentin or alternatively using macrolides (Visca et al., 2020).

References

Liu, H., Chen, S., Liu, M., Nie, H., & Lu, H. (2020). Comorbid Chronic Diseases are Strongly Correlated with Disease Severity among COVID-19 Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Aging and Disease, 11(3), 668. https://doi.org/10.14336/AD.2020.0502