Ventilatory capacity and productive cough in a rural community.

Relationship of the loose cough sign to daily sputum volume. Observer variation in its detection.

“…Hong et al found a loose cough to be related both to a current history of cough and sputum and to previous acute bronchitis, but not to previous pneumonia. Cullen et al (1969) used the loose cough sign in a comprehensive survey of 1,638 men from Busselton, a rural community in Western Australia. They found a highly significant relationship between the presence of a loose cough and reduced values for the forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1), the forced vital capacity, and the ratio between these two indices.…”