Strategy for improving the quality of treatment for children with acute respiratory infections

• Main Author: A. I. Safina
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Remedium Group LLC 2020-11-01
• Series: Медицинский совет
• Subjects: acute respiratory infections; viruses; children; polypharmacy; homeopathy
• Online Access: https://www.med-sovet.pro/jour/article/view/5889

Acute respiratory infections are the most common problem in the paediatric practice, especially in young children: 112,981.86 per 100,000 population at the age of 1-2 years and 106,996.16 per 100,000 population at the age of 3–6 years. Modern features of the etiology of respiratory infections in children are represented by associations of pathogens, among which are respiratory viruses, herpes viruses, bacterial pathogens, which makes additional problems in the treatment. On the one hand, the treatment of acute respiratory infections is not such a difficult problem, yet at the same time it is very often ineffective, and a pediatrician has to prescribe additional medications, which leads to polypharmacy and a potential risk of side effects. According to statistics, the number of drugs to be administered to treat ARVI reaches three or more INNs in 70% of cases, which involves the risk of drug-drug interactions and adverse events. For example, administration of two drugs leads to drug-drug interactions in 6% of patients, administration of five drugs increases the frequency of such effects up to 50%, and if a patient administers 10 drugs, this indicator reaches 100% of cases. A modern strategy for improving the quality of treatment of children with acute respiratory infections is to use homeopathic medicines, since they have a complex effect (antiviral, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, etc.), mutually reinforce and complement each other if they are given in combination, and have the maximum therapeutic effect while minimizing the drug load.  According to the results of the meta-analysis of 29 clinical studies in 5,062 patients with acute upper respiratory  infections, the administration of complex homeopathic medicines has demonstrated a positive result in favour of  homeopathy: 6 of 7 RCTs showed that the homeopathic treatment was at least equivalent to the conventional treatment, and 8 of 16 placebocontrolled studies showed advantage of homeopathy.