We usually just brush off hiccups when they happen. You may try your grandmother’s favorite remedy, but most people just suffer through it until it passes.

But what if it is severe and does not subside?

That could mean that you are at severe risk of dying and should call an ambulance as quickly as you can. In fact, you’d better be quick, as you may soon not be able to make that life-saving call any more.

A hiccup is a sudden contraction of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles, followed by a sudden closure of the glottis, which is the part of the larynx that consists of the vocal cords and the gap between them. Scientists do not know for sure why we hiccup, and because of its relative insignificance, no one has really bothered to study its purpose much.

Hiccupping is, however, not always insignificant. It may indicate that you are either having a stroke, or that you have already had a stroke.

Experts have known for many years that hiccupping sometimes coincides with stroke, but surveys show that only 10 percent of people are aware of this fact. Moreover, researchers are concerned that doctors are not familiar with this symptom either, which can have fatal consequences if you visit the doctor with hiccups that he/she fails to identify as a possible stroke.

Medical scientists do not yet understand why strokes cause hiccups, but they have ventured some educated hypotheses.

Hiccups occur when:

1. Your phrenic and vagus nerves and your T6-T12 sympathetic nerves send sensory information from your abdomen and chest to the breathing center in your brain.

2. The breathing center, which is located in your brainstem, has an action to prevent inhalation, such as when you need to exhale. It gets activated when these nerves send the message that inhalation is inappropriate.

3. Through a process that is still a mystery, this mechanism to prevent inhalation is suddenly disabled.

4. This causes a sudden discharge from the breathing center, back to the phrenic and vagus nerves which, in turn, trigger the hiccup muscles to start contracting.

This means that both your brain and your nervous system are involved in hiccupping. There is a part of the brain that is supposed to stop you from breathing in, and there are nerves that carry messages between your brain and the muscles that contract during the hiccup.

Where are the days, when you thought hiccups were caused by the swallowing of air?

At least this gives a partial explanation for why stroke causes hiccups. Either your brain or the nerves that carry the messages are damaged when the blood flow to your brain is cut off.

Researchers have found that strokes originating in the brain stem tend to cause hiccups, which makes sense, as the breathing center is located low in the brainstem in an area called the medulla oblongata. This also explains why some other diseases of the nervous system and some drugs that work on them can cause hiccups.

This is not only an interesting fact to file in your memory; it might be a life-saving one.

One of the most common causes of a stroke is a blood clot that blocks an artery that takes blood to your brain.

Drugs are available to break up such clots, which can significantly minimize the damage that is caused by a stroke.

These drugs must be given within three hours of the stroke, however; otherwise, they are no longer effective.

Think of it: every second that blood is cut off from reaching a part of your brain, millions of brain cells die without oxygen and nutrients. The quicker you get the medication to break up the blood clot, the better the chance that nothing crucial will be damaged.

Physicians have calculated that three hours of blood starvation damage is fatal in almost all cases.

This is why you should not brush off severe hiccupping as simply annoying. If it continues non-stop and it is so severe that it is painful, consider immediate emergency treatment. It could save your life.

Better, however, is to completely clean up the arteries of any plaque. We teach this as well as optimizing your cholesterol level here…

But one of the main causes of stroke is high blood pressure. Here is how to lower your high blood pressure in 9 minutes without side effects…