Why do we get hiccups – and how do we stop them?

ONE hundred years ago on June 13, Charles Osborne, a man from Iowa in the US, started hiccupping – and he didn’t stop for 68 years!

Can you imagine that? More than half a century of hiccupping?

Yet we know this absurd story is true because Osborne holds the honour of the longest-known case of hiccups in history, according to Guinness World Records.

Fortunately, most of us get the hiccups only once in a while. But have you ever wondered what’s going on inside your body when it happens?

It probably has to do with something you’ve eaten recently, said Ali Seifi, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Health at San Antonio. “Eating or drinking too fast, spicy food, carbonated soda, or a large meal of dry foods such as pasta or bread can trigger a muscle in our belly called the diaphragm,” Seifi said.

Normally, the diaphragm helps our lungs breathe in and out. But sometimes it can twitch or spasm.

“Those spasms send a message to the brain and the brain sends a message to our throat to close our vocal cords,” he said. “And that sudden closure is what makes the hiccup sound.”

Hiccups usually go away when your diaphragm stops responding to whatever you ate or drank. There are also home remedies: having someone surprise you, breathing into a paper bag, or swallowing a spoonful of sugar.

But the best way to defeat a bad case of the hiccups is to treat what’s happening inside your body. Seifi created a special straw that does just that. It’s called HiccAway. It makes you suck five times harder than a normal straw, which makes your diaphragm flex. Then, when the liquid reaches your mouth and you swallow, your throat has to relax your vocal cords.

“So the two (body parts) that are causing the hiccups are now busy with more important tasks,” said Seifi. |