Ditch the Dimetapp?

I just finished up the teaching part of my teaching fellowship.  I got to teach five weeks of an undergrad organic class, and I had a blast!  As the seasons started to change, though, I started to hear more and more coughing and sneezing and sniffling.  Everyone's all concerned with the swine flu, but we're also entering cough and cold season, too.

The news I'm presenting today from ScienceDaily is old news, but I hadn't heard it before... That makes it news to me   In an article published in 2004 in the journal Pediatrics (DOI: 10.1542/peds.114.1.e85), Dr. Ian Paul of Penn State Children's Hospital studied the effect of dextromethorphan and diphenhydramine versus placebo in providing nighttime relief from cough symptoms as a result of upper respiratory infection.

Dextromethorphan is sold as an antitussive (cough medicine) in just about every cough formulation known to man.  The study specifically tested cough syrups in children ages 2-18.  Parents were given a survey to used to rate severity of symptoms.  The following morning, parents filled out a second survey re-rating the same symptoms.  The follow up survey also asked how both the children and parents slept during the night.

The double blind study showed that while symptoms did improve with the active ingredients, there was no statistical improvement over placebo.  On the scoring scale used in the study, children taking dextromethorphan improved 10.06 points, while those taking diphenhydramine improved an average of 11.79 points.  By comparison, children in the placebo group improved 10.85 points.

Given that dextromethorphan can easily be abused when taken in high doses, one wonders whether a spoonful of sugar (in the form of honey) might be as good of a cough syrup as any.  Keep this in mind when you browse the shelf at the drug store this winter.

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