Impaired planning and reasoning affect the individuals ability to realistically assess and manage the problems of everyday living. New problems and situations may be especially poorly handled because of the inability to transfer previous knowledge to the new event. An individual that has DES may have a short attention span due to impairment in attentional control. This may alter the individuals ability to focus, and as such have difficulty with reading and following a storyline or conversation. For instance, they can easily lose track of conversations which can make it difficult to hold a meaningful conversation and may result in avoiding social interactions.Individuals with DES will have very poor working memory and short term memory due to executive dysfunction. The dysfunction can range from mild and subtle to severe and obvious. There is a tremendous variability in the manifestations of executive dysfunction with strong influences often apparent from the affected persons personality, life experiences and intellect. Individuals with DES may experience confabulation, which is the spontaneous reporting of events that never happened. This can affect their autobiographical memory. It is thought that patients may not be able to assess the accuracy of memory retrieval and therefore elaborate on implausible memories.Individuals with dementia, delirium or other severe psychiatric illnesses combined with DES often have disturbed sleep patterns. Some will not recognize that it is night-time and may become upset when someone tries to correct them. Emotional symptoms
The emotional symptoms that individuals with DES experience may be quite extreme and can cause extensive problems.
Acute complications include cough syncope (fainting spells due to decreased blood flow to the brain when coughs are prolonged and forceful), insomnia, cough-induced vomiting, subconjunctival hemorrhage or "red eye", coughing defecation and in women with a prolapsed uterus, cough urination. Chronic complications are common and include abdominal or pelvic hernias, fatigue fractures of lower ribs and costochondritis. Chronic or violent coughing can contribute to damage to the pelvic floor and a possible cystocele. Differential diagnosis
A cough in children may be either a normal physiological reflex or due to an underlying cause. In healthy children it may be normal in the absence of any disease to cough ten times a day. The most common cause of an acute or subacute cough is a viral respiratory tract infection. A healthy adult also coughs 18.8 times a day on average, but in the population with respiratory disease the geometric mean frequency is 275 times a day. In adults with a chronic cough, i.e. a cough longer than 8 weeks, more than 90% of cases are due to post-nasal drip, asthma, eosinophilic bronchitis, and gastroesophageal reflux disease. The causes of chronic cough are similar in children with the addition of bacterial bronchitis. Infections
A cough can be the result of a respiratory tract infection such as the common cold, COVID-19, acute bronchitis, pneumonia, pertussis, or tuberculosis. In the vast majority of cases, acute coughs, i.e. coughs shorter than 3 weeks, are due to the common cold. In people with a normal chest X-ray, tuberculosis is a rare finding.