Neurogenic cough is a chronic cough without a clear cause. It is thought to be related to irritation of a nerve that goes to the larynx (voice box). This can happen after a viral upper respiratory infection. Current treatment uses therapy or medications taken by mouth. Those medications can be sedating and not well tolerated. An alternative approach would be to perform an injection nerve block, which is commonly done for other nerve disorders such as around the spine. This may help people with neurogenic cough also. We studied this recently in a small group of patients and found that patients had improvement in their cough symptoms (Simpson 2018). It would be helpful to study this in a larger group of patients using more methods of evaluating cough symptom severity.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate if office-based injection of a local anesthetic/steroid combination at the area of one superior laryngeal nerve can decrease cough frequency and alleviate symptoms of chronic cough in patients with neurogenic cough.