Talk about a bad hiccup attack. In a recent case report, doctors describe an elderly man who endured years of incurable hiccups ultimately caused by an allergic condition.
Doctors in Lebanon detailed the strange medical tale in a paper published this month in the Journal of Medical Case Reports. The man’s hiccups got so bad that he eventually had to be hospitalized, at which point doctors discovered an unusual manifestation of a well-known but relatively rare type of allergy. Thankfully, once the cause was discovered, the man received proper treatment and his hiccups finally stopped.
Hiccups are involuntary contractions of the diaphragm, a thin muscle at the base of the chest that primarily helps us breathe. Usually, they’re short-lasting bouts of misery caused by any number of mundane things, such as eating too fast, drinking lots of carbonated beverages, or even getting excited. Rarely, though, hiccups can be a sign of a more serious health problem, especially if they don’t go away after a while.