Who hasn’t been there? You have just recovered from a cold, and all symptoms are gone, but that boggling cough just doesn’t seem to go away. It lasts for weeks, sometimes more than a month, and nothing seems to relieve it. Or perhaps, you haven’t been sick at all. One day you just wake up coughing and no matter what you do it doesn’t go away.
A dry cough is very rarely a sign of a serious condition but it can be very bothersome and affect the quality of your sleep if it wakes you up in the middle of the night. In order to get rid of your cough, you need to identify the cause of it. And you would be surprised at some of the reasons why that cough isn’t leaving you. Here is a list of not very commonly known causes of a dry cough that will surprise you.
1. Heating
This one is very counterintuitive because people are used to associating coughing with symptoms of a cold, and therefore, with low temperatures. However, not all coughs are caused by a cold room or walking out in cold weather, but instead, by warm air. How is that possible? What few people know is that hot and dry air can irritate our airways, and when the inner tissue of our throat becomes irritated we have a coughing reflex.
When we turn on our heating system, we change the humidity and temperature of the air, and if our throat isn’t used to it, it can be affected. Moreover, dust and dirt often accumulates on our stoves and heaters during the warm months, and when we first turn them on during the autumn all that dirt is pushed up by the rising hot air, and gets disseminated around the room. When we breathe it, we can get a cough.
