Recent medical review has suggested that the long-believed belief that humid air can relieve croup patients from barking cough and noisy croup breathing is a myth.
Lead reviewer Michael Moore, a family doctor at Three Swans Surgery in Salisbury, England, said that it is common for patients’ families to get them near a hot bath or have hot water in the room corners.
Moore further said that studies do not show that any benefits accrue from humid air or use of moisturized air in the emergency department. However, there may be possibilities that some existing benefits may not have been picked up during the studies and therefore the researchers need to get engaged in more research in community settings.
From News-Medical.Net:
Croup is a set of symptoms that causes swelling in the upper part of the airway and affects the voice box. The condition usually is caused by a viral infection. Young children are especially susceptible to croup because the infants and toddlers have narrower airways than older children and adults.
Physicians rate the severity of croup by noting signs of labored breathing and poor oxygen intake. The croup score and health outcomes for the children treated with moist air were not significantly different than the scores for the patients who received no treatment, the review found.
“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 Dennis Scolnik, an emergency room pediatrician at The Hospital for Sick Children/Toronto in Ontario, Canada.
“I think humidity probably wouldn’t harm. But I think it’s a false sense of security,” Scolnik said.
The finding that moist air does not help croup should be no surprise to physicians who’ve been trained or kept up-to-date in the last five to eight years, Scolnik said. But he added that popular beliefs are hard to root out of medical practice and common use.
“It’s probably going to take as much as a generation of doctors - and through that parents - 10, 15, 25 years to work its way out of the system. Most of our parents are going to come in and say ‘Oh, you’re not giving humidity, why not?’” Scolnik said.
Scolnik suggested that some calming techniques can be tried at home for mild croup. It is important to note here that steroids are often prescribed to minimize inflammation of the vocal chords over several hours and physicians use nebulized (given by mist) adrenaline for moderately severe croup for relieving a patient from symptoms.
