We all have our own little techniques to get rid of hiccups that are a little too annoying: the minute of apnea, the glass of water drunk upside down, the pinch of salt or even the famous “scare me, I have hiccups”. Whether these methods are effective or not, generally the small inconvenience passes within a few minutes. Generally, since in some extremely rare cases… it simply does not stop. This is what happened to this 93-year-old man, victim for two years of intermittent hiccups whose attacks became more and more frequent, until they no longer stopped. His symptoms even led him to be hospitalized.
His case was described by two Lebanese doctors in an article published on March 6, 2025 in the Journal of Medical Case Reports. The report explains that no apparent cause a priori explained why the man suffered from this illness. Furthermore, the patient administered medications, namely baclofen (a muscle relaxant) and chlorpromazine (an antipsychotic used against hiccups), to no avail. Nothing helped, the hiccups were still there. The patient’s case was a mystery to the doctors.
The doctors then carried out examinations on the patient. It was in his blood tests that they found a first clue. The elderly man had an abnormally high level of eosinophils in his blood, white blood cells that fight parasitic infections or appear in cases of asthma or allergies. The patient had an 18% level of eosinophils in his blood, much higher than normal, between 1 and 4%.
An extremely rare case
Other analyzes confirmed that the man was not suffering from a parasitic infection and that, therefore, his case was related to allergic symptoms. Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) was eventually diagnosed. This chronic digestive disease is still relatively unknown to doctors. The online magazine Gizmodo reports that the most common symptoms are difficulty swallowing, heartburn, and food stuck in the esophagus. The condition is generally diagnosed early in childhood or between the ages of 30 and 40.
Particularities which make the patient’s case even more exceptional, since he did not suffer from any of these usual symptoms. After digging through the annals of medicine, doctors found only two cases reporting symptoms of chronic hiccups caused by OeE. Furthermore, the disease did not appear until the patient was 90 years old, which is also unusual.
Doctors cite as a likely explanation that the OeE caused the patient to send nerve impulses from his esophagus to his diaphragm, causing repeated hiccups. No worries, however, the patient was prescribed corticosteroid treatment which definitively resolved his problem. Her blood eosinophil level returned to normal and her hiccups finally disappeared.
