News in Science

Placebo reduces the urge to cough

Mind control The desire to cough can be soothed by a placebo, suggesting that coughing can be controlled by more sophisticated thought centres in the brain, according to a small new study.

Stuart Mazzone, of the University of Queensland, and colleagues found that, on average, people given a placebo had 45 percent less of an urge to cough when inhaling capsaicin - the active ingredient in chilli - than they did when they did not receive placebo.

Ronald Eccles, the director of the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University in the UK, says that the study supports earlier work that placebos work just about as well to reduce coughing as anti-cough medicines.

"I think the key point is that if patients believe in a cough treatment then it does work for them," says Eccles.

An emerging idea among cough researchers is that coughing is not only a simple reflex, but is regulated by other areas of the brain that can be influenced by expectations that a substance can soothe the cough.

Mazzone's group sought to understand whether a placebo could also influence the urge to cough, which is the perception of irritation in the airways that precedes coughing.

The researchers asked 21 people to participate in a study in which they inhaled capsaicin.

After finding how much capsaicin each person needed to inhale to get the urge to cough, the researchers made the participants believe they would be getting lidocaine - a local anaesthetic that make the chemical less irritating - or a placebo as treatment.

In realty, however, all participants inhaled only inert gases that wouldn't impact their urge to cough.

After inhaling the inert gases, the participants inhaled full doses of capsaicin and asked whether they thought the "treatment" helped suppress their urge to cough.

In the first instance when the people were given the placebo, nine of them reported that they had less of an urge to cough than a group who were knowingly given a full-dose of capsaicin without any "medicine."

According to the study in the journal Chest, the participants had a 45 per cent reduction in the urge to cough -- from about a four on a 10-point scale to roughly a two.

"I was a little surprised by the magnitude of the response. It was very large," says Mazzone.

Why so strong?

Small studies have suggested that many other conditions respond to placebos, from depression to urinary problems to pain.

A recent study found that in some people, for example, depression responds well to placebo - sometimes just as much as to talk therapy or antidepressant medications.

Mazzone says the placebo response in cough appears to be even greater than in other health conditions.

A placebo's effect on pain, for instance, typically only reduces pain sensations by about 25 to 30 per cent, compared to the 45 per cent he saw in his study, says Mazzone.

"It's difficult to know why that is" that cough responds so well to placebo," he adds, speculating that the cough reflex is less hard-wired than the pain reflex, because the latter is "so critical for survival."