They’re giving props to nasal drops.
UK researchers say that hypertonic saline nasal drops can shorten a kid’s cold by two days and reduce the risk of family members getting sick too.
“Children have up to 10 to 12 upper respiratory tract infections, what we refer to as colds, per year, which have a big impact on them and their families,” explained University of Edinburgh professor Steve Cunningham. “There are medicines to improve symptoms, such as paracetamol and ibuprofen, but no treatments that can make a cold get better quicker.”
For the study, researchers taught parents how to make and apply salt water drops to their children’s noses. Three drops were administered to each nostril at least four times a day until the 150 young children got better.
The remaining 151 kids were given their typical cold treatment.
“We found that children using salt water nose drops had cold symptoms for an average of six days where those with usual care had symptoms for eight days,” Cunningham said. “The children receiving salt water nose drops also needed fewer medicines during their illness.”
Only 46% of nose drop households reported family members catching the child’s cold, versus 61% of the other households.
Eighty-two percent of parents said the nose drops helped their child get better quickly, with 81% declaring that they would use drops in the future.
The research will be presented soon at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress in Vienna, Austria.
The study’s chief investigator, consultant virologist Sandeep Ramalingam, noted that people in South Asia often use salt water solutions to treat colds.
Cunningham said the cells lining the respiratory tract use the chloride from the salty drops to produce hypochlorous acid to defend against viruses.
“By giving extra chloride to the lining cells, this helps the cells produce more hypochlorous acid, which helps suppress viral replication, reducing the length of the virus infection, and therefore the duration of symptoms,” Cunningham said.
Alexander Möeller, head of the ERS pediatric assembly, said this research is the first of its kind to investigate the effect of salty nose drops on children’s colds.
“This extremely cheap and simple intervention has the potential to be applied globally; providing parents with a safe and effective way to limit the impact of colds in their children and family would represent a significant reduction in health and economic burden of this most common condition,” said Möeller, who was not involved in the study.
The study authors also noticed that the children who received nasal drops wheezed less during their colds, and they plan to explore that further.
