The average child has six to eight colds per year. The symptoms last seven to nine days. Anything you can do to lessen the number of colds, or reduce their severity and duration will help your children stay healthy. Many products, both medications and natural remedies, are being promoted as doing this.
Echinacea, an herb purported as stimulating the immune system, has been used to prevent colds and treat the symptoms. However, there is little data to support these claims. To test the effectiveness of echinacea, over 500 healthy children were recruited from health care clinics and naturopathic offices.
For the four months of the study, the parents were instructed to call a study coordinator if the child developed any signs or symptoms of a cold. The children then began taking either echinacea syrup or placebo syrup. Using a predefined scale, the parents recorded all their children's symptoms and the severity of each symptom. Unless prescribed by a physician, the children were not to receive any other medicine except for acetaminophen.
During the four months of the study, there were 707 colds among 407 children. A lucky few had no colds. Three hundred and seventy of the infections were treated with placebo, 337 with echinancea. There were no differences in the number, severity, or duration of the symptoms, peak severity of symptoms, number of days of peak symptoms, number of days of fever, or parental assessment of the severity of the cold.
So is echinacea useful in treating the symptoms of a cold? In the doses used in this study, the answer is no. The only difference found was that fewer children given the echinacea had a second or third cold during the study period than the placebo group, but the difference was too small to draw any conclusions.
Different doses, frequencies of dosing, or formulations might affect echinacea's effectiveness.
Journal of the American Medical Association, 12/3/03.
May not be reproduced in any format without written permission.
