The popular herbal medication echinacea has been found no more effective than a placebo in treating children with a cold, a new study shows.
Children given a placebo at the onset of cold symptoms were no slower to recover and no more likely to have harsher symptoms than the children treated with echinacea, says lead author James Taylor, a professor of pediatrics at Seattle's University of Washington.
As well, the children given echinacea were more than twice as likely to develop mild rashes than the children given the placebo.
“Given its lack of documented efficacy and an increased risk for the development of rash, our results do not support the use of echinacea for treatment of [upper respiratory tract infections] in children 2 to 11 years old,” Dr. Taylor writes. “Further studies using different echinacea formulations, doses, and dosing frequencies are needed to delineate any possible role for this herb in treating colds in young patients.”
The results are to be published in Wednesday's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Taylor and his team say that colds are “a significant health burden” in childhood and that the average child has six to eight colds every year. They point out that youngsters are given over-the-counter medications frequently – noting that other researchers have estimated that as many as one in five North American children receiving conventional care also use alternative therapies – but that there is little evidence that these are helpful.
The researchers tracked 524 children over a four-month period. The overwhelming majority of these children contracted at least one cold during the study – there were a total of 707 colds identified – and they were, each time, randomly given a dose of either Echinacea purpurea (a type of echinacea derived from the flower of the echinacea plant) or a placebo.
The random dose, be it echinacea or placebo, was given to each child at the onset of symptoms and continued for as many as 10 days.
“There was no difference in duration between upper respiratory tract infections treated with echinacea or placebo,” the authors report. “There was also no difference in the overall estimate of severity of upper respiratory tract infection symptoms between the two treatment groups. In addition, there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups for peak severity of symptoms, number of days of peak symptoms or number of days of fever.”
The research was supported by funding from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The echinacea and placebo used in the study were provided by Madaus AG, a German company.
The president of Madaus' United States-based subsidiary, Jim Bruce, told Associated Press that numerous studies have shown the product to be effective at preventing and treating colds.
