Ontario doctor stumbles upon hiccups hypothesis

When holding your breath, drinking water, or having someone scare the bejesus out of you fails to stop your hiccups Dr. Daniel Howes can't really help you either.

But the Kingston, Ont. physician may be able to explain why you're doing it in the first place.

As CTV News reports, Howes believes he may have solved the age-old biological mystery of what makes people hiccup.

The associate professor in Emergency Medicine & Critical Care at Queen's University writes in the latest issue of BioEssays that we hiccup because we're trying to remove swallowed air from the stomach, much like burping.

While annoying, Howes argues that this reflex has an evolutionary advantage: hiccupping allows sucking infants to consume a higher volume of milk.

Howes has been interested in the biological phenomenon since one of his undergraduate professors mentioned that hiccupping is still an unexplained bodily function.

While he came up with the burping theory years ago, Howes never managed to pinpoint the reason why. Like many proverbial lightbulbs, his went off in the middle of the night while engaged in a random task: bottle-feeding his newborn daughter.

"I was burping her and after she burped, I could feed her some more. For whatever reason, that's when it came to me," Howes told the Toronto Star.

When we hiccup, our muscles used for breathing contract sharply, followed by a sudden closure of the vocal chords — that's where the "hic" sound comes from. In Howes' paper, he suggests that with each hiccup spasm, a vacuum is created in the chest, pulling air out of the stomach in a reflex that acts much like a burp.

This is why babies hiccup more than adults, he argues: when they hiccup, it removes the air that gets trapped in their tiny stomachs when they try to eat and breath simultaneously.

"The presence of a burping reflex provides a significant survival advantage," he writes. "…A reflex that helps remove swallowed air would significantly increase the stomach's capacity for milk. This also explains why the hiccup is so much more frequent in infancy."

Of course, as adults we're still prone to the occasional hiccup fit. To explain that, Howes confirms what your mother has been telling you since you were a kid.

"For adults, the infrequent annoying affliction reflects persistence of an infantile reflex and a reminder that we may have eaten too quickly," he explains.

Other reasons, Howes notes, come from eating too much, consuming gassy foods, or knocking back one too many soda pops.

Though Howes' hypothesis lacks concrete proof, he hopes his essay provides some scientific food for thought (of the non-gassy kind.)

Next up? A cure would be wonderful. Though the list is longer than it is effective, Howes says the best way to slow them down is by breathing into a paper bag. Hiccups that persist beyond 48 hours are likely symptoms of something more serious and should be checked out by a doctor.