What’s up with hiccups? – Harvard Health

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If you do an Internet search on “hiccups” you’ll find lots of supposed cures for this annoying but usually fast-passing condition — one site lists 250 of them! One thing you won’t find, though, is a good reason for why we hiccup.

Hiccupping is a more complex reflex than it might seem: a sudden contraction or spasm of the diaphragm and the muscles between the ribs makes you inhale quickly and involuntarily. It ends with “glottic closure” — the space in the throat near the vocal cords snaps shut, producing the typical hiccup sound. The technical term for hiccups (singultus) comes from a Latin word (singult) that means catching your breath while crying, which seems like a pretty good description of the sound of hiccupping.

In most cases hiccups seem to serve no purpose and go away on their own, usually after 30 or more hiccups. Any of the following may cause a short bout of hiccups:

• an overly full stomach, due to too much food, too much alcohol, or too much air in the stomach
• sudden changes in temperature, either outside your body or internally
• smoking cigarettes
• excitement, stress, or other heightened emotions.

Making hiccups go away

Of the many, many ways to get rid of hiccups, here are a few you can try that are logical, considering the muscles and tissues involved:

• Stimulating the nasopharynx, or the uppermost region of the throat, by pulling on your tongue, swallowing granulated sugar, gargling with water, sipping ice water, drinking from the far side of a glass, or biting on a lemon (not all at once, of course)
• Stimulating the skin that covers the spinal nerves near the neck by tapping or rubbing the back of the neck
• Stimulating the pharynx, or back of the throat, by gently poking it with a long cotton swab
• Interrupting your normal respiratory cycle by holding your breath, breathing into a paper bag (which increases the amount of carbon dioxide you inhale), gasping in fright, or pulling your knees up to your chest and leaning forward
• Distracting your mind from the fact that you have the hiccups.

And when hiccups won’t go away…

Occasionally, hiccups just won’t go away. A farmer in Iowa reportedly had hiccups for 60-plus years. Imagine that annoying, interrupting gasp for air coming every few seconds for 60 years! Luckily, even long-lasting hiccups don’t usually signal a medical problem. Very rarely, though, persistent hiccups may be a sign of disease, usually something that causes irritation of one of the nerves in the chest. Examples include laryngitis, goiters (enlargement of the thyroid gland), tumors in the neck, infections near the diaphragm, and hiatal hernia (usually accompanied by heartburn). Hiccups can also be triggered by excess alcohol use, kidney failure, and infections (especially ear infections). Rarer causes are aortic aneurysms and multiple sclerosis.

Persistent hiccups can also cause problems of their own. Think about it — hiccupping can make it difficult to eat, drink, and sleep, all things you need to do to keep healthy.

If you have hiccups that won’t go away on their own, your doctor will look for problems that may be causing them, and then try to fix that problem. Your doctor may also prescribe a medication (there are some that can reduce hiccups) — or tell you to stop taking a particular drug, because there are medications that can set off the hiccups.

Surgery for persistent hiccups is also an option, though one that’s exercised rarely. Two examples are a “nerve block” that stops the phrenic nerve (the major nerve supply for the diaphragm) from sending signals so that the diaphragm stops contracting, and implantation of a pacemaker to make the diaphragm contract in a more rhythmic pattern.

The bottom line

So, to review: we don’t know why we hiccup and we don’t know how to reliably get rid of them. They are as mysterious as they are universal. And it seems that just about everyone has a cure. Here’s my favorite: waiting a few minutes.

What’s the deal with hiccups? Experts explain what they are and how to stop them

CNN
 — 

It’s cute when your sleeping puppy does it. It’s not so cute when you are having a serious conversation with a friend post-feast and you just can’t stop.

It’s the hiccups.

Along with “Covid-19,” “vaccinations” and “helping one another,” “hiccups” appeared as one of the most searched terms on Google for 2021. That may come as a surprise. Everyone gets them – why all the questions?

For all the medical and scientific advancements humanity has made over the years, there is still a lot we don’t know about hiccups. The irony of that struck Dr. Ali Seifi, a neuro intensivist, while checking up on a patient who was recovering from surgery for brain trauma. The patient had been gulping down water to cure the case of hiccups that had come on in his hospital room.

“He turned to me and said, ‘Doctor, this is the 21st century. You guys have treatments for cancer, for strokes, for heart attacks, but not such a simple thing as hiccups?’” said Seifi, director of the Neuro-ICU and an associate professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Seifi has developed a simple tool called HiccAway – a plastic straw-like tube that increases pressure to lower the diaphragm when you drink – that he said is effective for stopping hiccups in most circumstances. But there is still much the public and the medical community don’t understand about the common occurrence, he added.

What’s your hack to cure hiccups? Tell us at [email protected] and you could be featured in CNN’s weekly science newsletter. Sign up here to receive the next edition of Wonder Theory in your inbox.

To understand hiccups, you have to know about the diaphragm, the major muscle that controls breathing, which sits just below the lungs and near the stomach. When you breathe in, the diaphragm contracts and your chest expands.

Hiccups are sudden spasms of that muscle, Seifi said, and they send a message to your brain to close a flap in your throat again and again – hence the “hic” sound.

The “up” comes from the release of the pressure when the flap opens up, said Dr. Mark Fox, a professor of gastroenterology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

The answer to the question of what causes them is perhaps disappointing: We often don’t know.

A link to Google’s proposal to a workable news code on the company’s homepage, arranged on a desktop computer in Sydney, Australia, on Friday, Jan. 22, 2021. Google threatened to disable its search engine in Australia if its forced to pay local publishers for news, a dramatic escalation of a months-long standoff with the government. Photographer: David Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images

David Gray/Bloomberg/Getty Images

According to our Google searches, 2021 was about getting better

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They can be sparked by many everyday things, including spicy food, alcohol, carbonated beverages, eating too fast, eating a large meal or acid reflux, Seifi said.

Take spicy food, for example: It can irritate the stomach chemically, and – since the stomach is so close to the diaphragm – that can stimulate the muscle to spasm, which alerts the brain to hiccup, Seifi said.

The irritation impacts the nerves that connect the brain to the gut, Fox said.

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And the purpose of the hiccup? There is really only educated guesses there, too, Seifi said. Some scientists theorize that there was a point in evolution where life moved from water to land, and those organisms needed something to prevent water from going into their lungs, he added.

Some people think drinking a glass of water can stop hiccups.

sebra/Adobe Stock

Everyone gets them, Seifi said.

Children, teens, adults and dogs get hiccups. There is even a belief in the scientific community that all mammals get them, Seifi said.

They are more common in younger humans, said Fox. In fact, hiccups can be extremely common in babies in the womb – which is interesting, because they aren’t using their lungs yet, Fox said.

“The reason that I think most people think the hiccups occur (in the uterus) is that it is actually training the respiratory muscles in the womb … because you do need to breathe just as soon as you’re born. By repeatedly contracting and relaxing the diaphragm and the (other) breathing muscles, it trains the baby,” Fox said.

But as humans get older, there is no clear pattern to who gets hiccups more often.

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Seifi said. “Nobody knows why some people get more hiccups.”

It could have to do with the variance in human bodies, he added. One person might have a diaphragm more attached to their stomach than another, and therefore their stomach irritation is more likely to result in hiccups.

Often when someone starts to hiccup, a debate begins among everyone nearby over which home remedy is the true cure.

Yeti Rambler

The beastly Yeti Rambler is a great everyday water bottle (CNN Underscored)

They all are a little right, Seifi said.

Whether it’s holding your breath, drinking cups of water quickly and in succession, drinking upside down, or getting scared, Seifi said there is actually good science behind the old wives’ tales passed down through the generations.

The ones that involve breathing or drinking include long contractions of the diaphragm, and getting scared or surprised can impact the nerves that are associated with hiccups, Seifi said.

“They didn’t know what they were doing, but in fact they were targeting these muscles,” he said of the originators of the home remedies.

There are cases where prolonged hiccups lasting more that two days can be a symptom of another problem, and in those cases, Fox recommended people see their doctor. But for your more typical situations, sticking to your tried-and-true cure may be your best bet, he said.

Newborn baby hiccups after feeding: what to do and how to help him

One of the causes of concern for the mother is the baby’s hiccups. Most often, it occurs after feeding, passes quickly and does not cause much alarm, but sometimes the child hiccups for quite a long time. Elena Bondareva, a pediatrician and leading specialist of the Semeynaya clinic network, spoke about whether it is necessary to worry and how to help the baby in her Gazeta.Ru column.

Why newborn babies hiccup

Even during pregnancy, a woman may feel that the baby hiccups. This is due to the baby swallowing amniotic fluid or preparing for respiratory movements.

Hiccups are caused by synchronous contractions of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles, which imitate inhalation, but no air enters, as the airways are closed by the epiglottis, and a strangled sound occurs due to the sharp closing of the glottis.

Most often, hiccups occur when the vagus and phrenic nerves are irritated, which cause contractions of the diaphragm.
With fast, hasty, restless sucking at the breast, if the baby is breastfed, or bottles, if he is on mixed or artificial feeding, he can swallow air and overeat, this causes distension of the stomach and irritates the vagus nerve.

With regular regurgitation in a newborn, the contents of the stomach can irritate the esophageal mucosa and also stimulate the nearby vagus nerve.

Another reason may be hypothermia.

Is hiccups dangerous for a child?

It must be understood that such a condition does not harm the child. If the baby is active, feels good, you should not worry.
If the child cries, feels unwell, sleep and appetite are disturbed, if hiccups accompany vomiting, it is necessary to contact a pediatrician to determine the causes of the ailment.

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If a newborn spits up due to overeating and this is accompanied by hiccups, this is not dangerous and is not a problem. If, against the background of regurgitation, the child is healthy, gains weight and height well, this is a variant of the norm. If regurgitation is abundant, regular, vomiting occurs, the baby is not gaining weight well, you should definitely consult a doctor.

In case of hypothermia, if the child is wet or cold, he can also hiccup, then it is enough to change clothes and warm the baby so that the hiccups stop.

Other causes can also cause hiccups, including diseases of various organs, but this still applies more to adults, in children such conditions are very rare, only if the hiccups last for a long time, you can’t stop it, it makes sense to be examined by a pediatrician.

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How to stop hiccups in a newborn baby

First check if the child is wet or cold. The legs and arms may be cool, this is normal, so touch the body in the chest area, the skin should be warm. If this is the reason, the child needs to be changed and warmed up. If the child has overeaten or air has entered the stomach during feeding, hold it in a column, pat lightly on the back until the air bubble is discharged.

If the abdomen is swollen due to increased growth, a clockwise massage of the abdomen can be done to help the gas pass.
If the baby is formula-fed, hold the bottle while feeding so that there is no air, only milk. The hole in the nipple should not be too large so that it does not choke.

If the newborn is breastfeeding, feed in a 30 degree elevated position to reduce the chance of spitting up.

If hiccups persist and the previous methods did not help, you can apply to the chest for a minute or give some water to drink.

So, hiccups is a physiological condition, not dangerous for a child. Your task is to find the cause and, if possible, eliminate it. If the hiccups last too long, the baby is restless, he has pronounced spitting up or vomiting, consult a doctor for help.

Causes of hiccups in babies and what to do with frequent hiccups in a child.

— Polina Aleksandrovna, please tell us why a newborn baby hiccups, what are the causes of hiccups in babies?

The baby hiccups before birth in the mother’s belly

– The first hiccups occur when the baby is still a fetus in the mother’s womb.

Causes of hiccups

• There is no clear theory that would explain the mechanism of such hiccups. Some experts associate it with preparing for respiratory movements, others say that the baby swallows amniotic fluid – his stomach overflows and irritates the vagus nerve near the diaphragm.

Infant hiccups

— In newborns and older children, hiccups are also often caused by irritation of the vagus nerve. The preconditions for such irritation are different. And every kid has their own.

Causes of hiccups

• Overeating: the contents of the intestines or stomach are so voluminous that they compress the vagus nerve.
• Regular regurgitation: stomach contents enter the esophagus and irritate its mucosa. Thus, the excitation is transmitted to the vagus nerve, including the diaphragm.
• Hypothermia: the baby is just cold, uncomfortable in a wet diaper.

— When can we say that hiccups are frequent?

– There is no clear indication that so many hours a day is the norm, and more is not the norm. More importantly, it turns out or not to cope with hiccups.

Example

The cause of hiccups is overeating. The child overate – his stomach increased in size and began to irritate the vagus nerve – hiccups appeared. If at the same time the child burped a little or little time passed (the contents of the stomach got further into the intestines), then, accordingly, the stomach stopped pressing on the vagus nerve, the hiccups disappeared. The hiccups arose not because something was wrong with the nervous system, but because the child had overeaten.

Even if this happens every feeding, we can see the cause of the hiccups. And if you do not overfeed the child, it will not. In this case, even regular hiccups will be considered a variant of the norm.

It is not normal when we cannot find the cause of hiccups and cannot cope with it in any way. Therefore, it is necessary to focus not on the frequency of hiccups, but on whether it is possible to cope with it.

— Why are young mothers afraid of hiccups? Is it really necessary to worry?

– Frightening because they think the hiccups make the baby uncomfortable. And mom wants to help her baby so that everything is in order. But in most cases, hiccups are not a problem, and usually the child is not worried. The hiccups worries mom. Therefore, if everything is fine with the child and he is active, he has a normal mood, he does not react to hiccups in any way, mom should not worry.

– Is it possible to recognize the symptoms of hiccups that indicate problems with the health of the baby?

— When a child cries and cannot calm down, something is clearly wrong with him. In such a situation, it is worth thinking about the fact that hiccups are not the cause of anxiety – most likely, it becomes one of the manifestations of a condition that worries the baby. Here the hiccups will be secondary. In this case, it is better to consult a doctor and find out what is happening to the child. But if the child is all right, he is active, cheerful and cheerful, then, of course, mom should not worry.

– Hiccups end in vomiting – is this a reason to visit a pediatrician?

— The presence of vomiting in a baby is a rather unpleasant symptom, with which it is advisable to see a doctor anyway. However, it is necessary to separate vomiting and regurgitation.

If the child vomits

When the food eaten has almost completely left the child’s stomach, this is not normal and there is obviously some kind of problem. In such a situation, hiccups are secondary, and the problem must be dealt with with the doctor.

If the child is spitting up

Most likely, we are dealing with overeating. The kid overate – his stomach increased a little – the child burped up the excess part, which interfered with him. After that, the hiccups stopped, the baby felt better. This situation is a variant of the norm. And if everything is in order with the child, weight gain is according to the age norm, then this should not bother the mother in any way.

Read also

• About the causes of frequent regurgitation in newborns

— Polina Alexandrovna, is it true that hiccups can indicate heart disease?

– This is actually true for adults – hiccups can be a sign of myocardial infarction.

This happens quite rarely in babies. In isolated cases, hiccups can be a sign of an inflammatory disease (when inflammation is localized in the area of ​​the vagus nerve, leading to irritation and hiccups). You can notice deviations when no measures help stop the hiccups in the child. It is worth consulting with a doctor and making sure that there are no health problems, no diseases in the child.

– Can hiccups indicate that the baby is cold?

— Indeed, there is such an opinion. An adult, when he freezes, trembles – more precisely, his muscles tremble. When a baby is cold, he also has similar rhythmic contractions.

But there is no need to go to extremes. Usually, a baby of the first year of life always has cold hands and feet – this is normal and does not mean that he is cold. However, if the baby hiccups, make sure that he is warm – touch the back and tummy, see if the diaper is wet. If the baby has a cold back and is wearing a wet, cold diaper, then, of course, you need to change him into warm, dry clothes – and perhaps the hiccups associated with hypothermia will pass.

— What type of feeding causes hiccups more often — breastfeeding, formula feeding or formula feeding?

— It is difficult to distinguish the relationship with the method of feeding — each of them has its own characteristics. It cannot be said that in some group children hiccup more often, and in some less often.

• Hiccups with formula feeding

  Hiccups can be caused by the fact that formula stays longer in the stomach. In babies of the first year of life, the transition from the esophagus to the stomach is not the same as in adults – the contents of the stomach in children are thrown into the esophagus more easily. Accordingly, the longer the food is in the stomach, the more opportunities for this casting. Therefore, bottle-fed babies may spit up slightly more often than breast-fed babies. And it is regurgitation, when the contents of the stomach irritates the esophagus, that can lead to hiccups.

— Is it possible to feed a child with hiccups?

– You can feed with hiccups. Usually feeding even helps if the baby is not overfed. Therefore, you need to monitor the amount of food so that the child does not eat excessively. In all other cases (even if the child burped), in order to cope with hiccups, it is permissible for half a minute – to attach it to the breast or bottle for a minute – the baby will make several swallowing movements, and the contents of the stomach will “wash away” from the walls of the esophagus. Often this helps to cope with hiccups.

— What to do with hiccups in children — how to stop it, what are the ways to help?

– It is desirable to understand what led to the appearance of hiccups. And, of course, there are ways that a mother can use herself to help her baby.

Cause of hiccups in children

• Subcooling
• Overeating
• Regurgitation
• Excessive air entering the stomach during feeding
• Increased gas formation in the intestines
• Reason unclear and everyone tried

What to do with hiccups in children

• Dress baby, change diaper.
• Check the amount of food eaten.
• Feed a little – give just a couple of sips – or give water to drink (if you give water).
• Hold the baby in a column, in an upright position, until the characteristic sound of excess air is released.
• A gas tube will help, which will free the intestines.
• Back massage – make stroking movements in the chest and lower back, circular movements in the tummy.

Nothing helps – see a doctor!

– Is it true that anti-colic bottles help with hiccups, or is it an advertisement?

– Anti-colic bottles help reduce air ingestion into baby’s stomach. However, even a regular bottle can be fed so that the baby does not swallow air. There are only two rules here:

1. The hole in the nipple – it should not be very large so that the flow is not too strong and the child does not choke.
2. Bottle tilt – hold the bottle so that only milk or formula is in the nipple, there must be no air in it.

In most cases, hiccups are not some kind of formidable sign and do not bother the baby. If you encounter this condition, you should try to calmly understand the cause of hiccups and eliminate it.