To compare the diagnosis and treatment regimens of children with chronic cough before and after admission to clinic

The most frequent reason for medical visits in childhood is cough as the major symptom of the respiratory system. Most of the diseases causing chronic cough could be treatable, thus the characterization and evaluation of cough is important for the diagnosis and treatment of the underlying disease. However inappropriate characterization of underlying disease causes undue treatment of patients. The aim of this study is to compare the diagnosis and treatment regimens of children with chronic cough before and after admission to our clinics.Our study is conducted retrospectively upon children with a history of chronic cough referred to the Department of Pediatrics and the Pediatric Pulmonology Unit of Abant Izzet Baysal University, Izzet Baysal Faculty of Medicine, between 2004 and 2008. A statistical software package (SPSS, version 11) was utilized for statistical analysis of the obtained data. The results were compared with Khi Square, Student-t test and McNemar test. P value <0.05 is considered to be significant.Of the recruited 487 subjects; 44.4% were female, 55.6% were male. The mean age was 63.62 ± 43.36 months. In our study asthma was found to be the most of the reason for chronic cough as compared to prior diagnoses, before referral to our clinic with after diagnosis (64.1 % vs 27.1 %), which proved to be statisticaly significant (p<0.0001). When treatment regimens are considered antibiotics were the most commonly prescribed drugs before referral (99.6) while they were prescribed less (2.9%) after assesment in Pediatric Pulmology Unit. This finding also proved to be statistically significant (p<0.0001As a result of study, asthma should be considered first in the differential diagnosis of chronic cough but since it could not be recognized these patients are prescribed antibiotics frequently.