how do we get hiccups?

Answer 1

who knows

Answer 2

When you hiccup, your diaphragm and nearby muscles convulse, causing you to briefly gulp air. Within 35 milliseconds the glottis (the opening at the top of the air passage) slams shut, producing the characteristic "hic."
If you're able to stifle the hiccup right away, great. But if you hiccup more than seven times you'd better settle in for the long haul. Once in hiccup mode you typically will hiccup 63 times or more. Maybe a lot more. The hiccup record, last time I checked, was 57 years.

Hiccups are commonly caused by distention of the stomach, which you get if you eat too much, drink carbonated beverages, or swallow too much air. This suggests hiccup as a sequela to boozing may be more the result of fizzy mixers than alcohol itself. Or else you just slurp.Lots of other things can cause hiccups too, some of them pretty scary. Skimming through a long list, I see skull fracture, epilepsy, diabetes mellitus, myocardial infarction, tuberculosis, meningitis, bowel obstruction, and ulcerative colitis.

But it's not always, or even usually, so bad. A 27-year-old man complained that he'd been hiccuping for four days. The doctor looked into the guy's ear and saw a hair tickling the eardrum. The hair having been washed out, the hiccups stopped.

Why do we hiccup? I don't know, and as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else. Unlike gagging, sneezing, etc., hiccups serve no known useful function. Some speculate that hiccups "may represent a vestigial remnant of a primitive reflex whose functional or behavioral significance is now lost," as one researcher put it.

Or maybe they're just, you know, hiccups--an accidental reflex triggered by a stimulus to (usually) the vagus or phrenic nerves. This travels up the line to a nerve control center that for some reason sends out a "commence hiccup" impulse via the phrenic nerve.

The vagus and phrenic nerves go all over, which explains why so many things cause hiccups. For example, a 16-year-old girl began hiccuping after receiving a blow to the jaw. A brain scan found that a blood vessel was pressing against the vagus nerve in her neck. Surgeons inserted a Teflon spacer between the nerve and the blood vessel, and the hiccuping stopped. When the spacer later fell out the hiccuping resumed.

I hope that explain a little.....

Answer 3

Why do we get hiccups?

When you hiccup, your diaphragm involuntarily contracts. (The diaphragm is a dome-shaped muscle that separates the chest cavity from the abdomen. It plays an extremely important role in breathing.)

This contraction of the diaphragm then causes an immediate and brief closure of the vocal cords, which produces the characteristic sound of a hiccup. What actually causes the hiccup is difficult to say - in most instances, there is no obvious cause.

Attacks of the hiccups seem to be associated with a few different things: eating or drinking too fast; being nervous or excited; or having irritation in the stomach and/or throat.

In some extremely rare cases, the underlying cause of hiccups can be pleurisy (inflammation of the membrane lining of the lungs and chest cavity), pneumonia, certain disorders of the stomach or esophagus, pancreatitis, alcoholism, or hepatitis. Any one of these conditions can cause irritation of the diaphragm or of the phrenic nerves that supply the diaphragm - it's the irritation that causes the hiccups.

Still, the cause of most attacks of the hiccups remains a mystery.


hope this helps!

Answer 4

Hiccups occur when diaphragm becomes irritated. When this happens, it pulls down in a jerky way, which makes you suck air into your throat suddenly.The sudden rush of air into the lungs causes the glottis to close, creating the "hic"
Some things that irritate the diaphragm are eating too quickly or too much, an irritation in the stomach or the throat, or feeling nervous or excited.

Answer 5

Since I find long-winded lectures tiresome, I'll just say hiccups are the diaphragm going into spasms.

Answer 6

What I know is that hiccups are contractions of the lungs

Answer 7

It is a spasm of the diaphragm. I think its due to liquid in your oesophagus causing the epiglottis to close and the muscle contraction causes hiccups

Answer 8

Air is trapped in your sturnum, a cure is to hold your breath not drinking water that does nothing. This has been proven.

Answer 9

Its your diaphragm going into a spasmodic mode. To get rid of them you just need to fully concentrate on your breathing. If they don't go, you aren't concentrating hard enough! x

Answer 10

Gulping food too quickly. Or it sometimes brought on by nervousness.

Answer 11

trapped air in the lungs