What to do if your eight-month-old baby has a dry cough

Babies under one year old encounter the most physical conditions. In addition to waking up frequently at night and catching colds, they are very susceptible to getting sick. At around eight months, babies have entered an important stage of physical growth. Although children at this age are not as weak as infants, they will always experience dry coughs.

Why does my baby cough?

As the saying goes, nine out of ten babies cough! Because the baby's respiratory tract is still fragile and not fully developed, the baby will often develop respiratory diseases at the slightest disturbance. From a medical point of view, a baby's cough is a defensive reflex of the body to expel respiratory secretions or foreign objects. In other words, coughing is a protective physiological phenomenon for babies. But if the coughing is too severe and affects diet, sleep and rest, then it loses its meaning of protecting the baby.

Age of coughing If a newborn baby has a cough, you should be careful about diseases such as aspiration pneumonia and congenital lung developmental abnormalities. Cough in older children is generally more common in respiratory tract infections. If a preschool baby coughs, airway infection and foreign bodies in the airway should be taken into consideration.

Coughing time: If your baby coughs in the morning, it is most likely a chronic disease, such as chronic inflammation of the upper respiratory tract and chronic bronchitis. If your baby coughs at night, it may be caused by diseases such as whooping cough and acute spasmodic laryngitis.

Baby coughing action analysis

A baby's cough can be broken down into four actions: short and deep inhalation; glottis closing; contraction of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles, increased intrapulmonary pressure; opening of the glottis, and the high-pressure air in the lungs is squeezed and ejected under the rapid contraction of the diaphragm. It is these four consecutive actions that combine to form a complete "coughing" process, and at the same time determine that coughs have different natures, rhythms, sounds and characteristics.

The nature of the cough is dry cough or irritating cough: it is more common in upper respiratory tract infection, tuberculosis, bronchial foreign body and other diseases. Wet cough or phlegm cough: more common in diseases such as bronchitis, bronchiectasis, lung abscess, etc.

The rhythm of cough: single cough: more common in diseases such as laryngitis and tracheitis. Paroxysmal or spasmodic cough: common in diseases such as tracheal foreign body, whooping cough, bronchial asthma, etc. Periodic cough: common in diseases such as chronic bronchitis and bronchiectasis.