Humidified air does little to calm kids' croup

NEW YORK, July 26 (Reuters) Traditionally, humidified air has been thought to relieve the barking, hoarse cough of childhood croup, but a new review of studies on the topic finds the remedy has little actual benefit.

Croup is a set of symptoms usually caused by a viral infection that causes swelling of the voice box in the upper part of the airway. Infants and toddlers are especially prone to croup because their upper airways are narrower than that of older children and adults.

For croup, ''typically you get people to run a hot bath or shower in the bathroom,'' or use other mean to create humidity leadre viewer Dr Michael Moore said in a statement. ''That's the kind of first-aid advice that is often given at the point of first contact with a health care professional.'' Moore, a family doctor at Three Swans Surgery in Salisbury, England, and his team reviewed three studies involving 135 children with croup who were treated in the emergency room with humidified air or no treatment.

The combined results of these three studies only ''marginally favored'' breathing humid air as a treatment for croup, reports the latest issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates research in health care.

None of the trials evaluated humid air treatments given at home. According to Moore, ''there's no particular reason to think that (humidified air) would work better at home.'' Nonetheless, he believes more research in the community setting is needed.

''I think that probably the successes that were attributed to humidity in the past were due to the calming effect of the parent believing that they were doing something, the child taking deeper breaths, the child getting over the spasmodic element of the croup, and then just getting better,'' said Dr Dennis Scolnik, a pediatrician from The Hospital for Sick Children/Toronto in Ontario, Canada.

''I think humidity probably won't harm. But I think it's a false sense of security,'' Scolnik said.

In cases of severe croup, children may be admitted to the hospital where steroids given by mouth or by mist are known to be effective.

''I think what we are saying is that there's no real place for moist air in the emergency room as a treatment for croup,'' Moore said. If a child is unwell enough for treatment, ''you might as well go ahead with a definitive treatment,'' he added.

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