Empirical treatment of chronic cough--a cost-effectiveness analysis.

Chronic cough of unknown etiology is often difficult to diagnose, thus, there exists controversy regarding the management of such patients. Although the ACCP (American College of Chest Physicians) statement in 1998 recommended that treatment should follow testing, recent evidence suggests that empirical treatment of GERD is more cost-effective than testing followed by treatment, in both chronic cough and non-cardiac chest pain. In this paper, we evaluated the cost-effectiveness in managing patients with chronic unexplained cough by building a decision model, and compared the cost-effectiveness of six most common management strategies. The outcome of our analysis demonstrates that empirical treatment is the cheapest option, while testing followed by treatment is the most expensive option with the shortest time course.