Sea-ing is Believing: New Way to Treat Cold Symptoms in Children
In the last few months, drug companies and the FDA have made efforts to communicate the dangers of using cough and cold medicines in children under 2, and the possibility that they could be ineffective in any children under 12. We’ve explored the news items here in 2 posts, “Feed a Cold, Because Cough & Cold Meds are Gone,” which was published when the news first broke and the cough and cold medications were recalled, and in last Friday’s “Need Money, Will Warn of Dangerous Drugs,” in which we reported that the FDA had made it official these cold medications were not good for younger children. Unfortunately, this means that parents can no longer take comfort in giving a sick child a cough or cold medicine as a remedy, and they’ll need to look to other means to help.
In the original post I wrote, there are some home remedies you can use to treat an ailing child: add some humidity to their bedroom at night, Tylenol, Motrin or Advil for fever control, and plenty of fluids. A study done in Amsterdam even gives credence to the old adage of feeding a cold and starting a fever. As new parents, and having been through treatment for the respiratory virus RSV early in our child’s life, we’re always interested in this advice whenever we can get it.
Researchers in Europe, in a study conducted on children ages 6 to 10, have discovered that treating colds with a nasal spray that dispenses a nebulized dose of Atlantic Ocean seawater might have the ability to ease cold symptoms faster than with nothing at all. The research, reported on the Reuters web site on Monday, January 21st, was conducted by Dr. Ivo Slapak and his colleagues at the Teaching Hospital of Brno in the Czech Republic (click here for the full article). The study was published as part of the January issue of the Archives of Otolaryngology, and was intended to strengthen the existing, but poor scientific evidence that saline washes are effective as a treatment for colds.
Goemar Laboratories La Madeline, a drug company based in Saint-Malo, France, was the sponsor for the study and also makes Physiomer, the seawater nasal spray used in the investigation. 360 children participated in the study who showed signs of uncomplicated flu symptoms. Some of the children were given standard treatments such as nasal decongestants, while others received the same medications plus the nasal saline wash. Lasting for 12 weeks in 2006, children given the regular doses of salt water seemed to get better more quickly and had fewer relapses. In addition, the saline group children were less likely to need fever-reducing drugs, nasal decongestants, mucous-reducing medications or even antibiotics. They were sick less often and missed fewer school days.
I initially had a problem with these study results, mainly because the article indicated the children were given the nasal spray in addition to “standard treatments, such as nasal decongestents.”(1) Yet at the conclusion of the study the data seems to indicate that these kinds of medications had no effect on the duration or relapses of the colds, corroborating the recommendations released by the FDA last week, and supporting the saline spray as a viable treatment for colds.
It’s unclear why the saline works the way it does right now; it could be that the saltwater clears mucus more effectively, or that there are trace chemical elements that act as a barrier for the proliferation of the virus in the body. Further studies, however, may result in an answer that could have even more children picking up a sample of seawater during the next flu season.
As a parent, you always look for ways to keep your child healthy and minimize the time that they’re sick. For many years, our culture sought the use of drugs to help make that happen, and we just assumed what worked for us would work for our children. Like food, however, a child metabolizes drugs differently than we do, and we need to make sure the kinds of treatments we give them take that into consideration. Cough and cold medicines don’t appear to be effective aids in keeping our children healthy, and therefore more study needs to be done to find out what does work. The Czech study is just one example of a group taking the initiative to do this.
In addition, and perhaps I’m being naive, but why look only for drugs that can do everything? As we’ve seen in a couple of the more recent studies from Europe, the answer might be as easy as a comforting, hearty bowl of soup, or cleaning out the little ones’ noses with a spray of water from the Atlantic. A sensible balance between synthesized and home remedies might be just the prescription we need.
What do you think?
(1) See “Seawater spray cures kids colds - Czech researchers,” Michael Conlon, Reuters, January 21st, 2008.
