Emollient Bath Additives for Children’s Eczema Treatment not effective

Emollient Bath Additives for Children’s Eczema not effective: Adding eczema treatment to children’s bathwater doesn’t help and is a drain on the NHS, researchers have said.

According to the team at the University of Southampton led by Miriam Santer, emollient bath treatments do not benefit children as an addition to leave-on formulas.

Emollients provide a barrier over skin which reduces the loss of moisture and protects against irritants.

They are used in the treatment of eczema, an inflammatory skin condition and can be given as a leave on cream, soap substitute or bath additive.

It costs the NHS in England more than £23m every year to prescribe bath additives. Currently, evidence supports using prescribed leave-on emollients, with clinical agreement concerning the use of soap substitutes. But there is little evidence proving the worth of using emollient bath additives.

Research involved a trial of 482 children aged between 1-11 years of age who had been diagnosed with mainly moderate eczema and from 96 difference practices in England and Wales.

Children were randomly put into two groups, one of which used bath additives for a year and a control group which used no bath additives.

They all used leave-on emollients as soap substitutes and continued to use their prescribed emollients and corticosteroid creams where applicable.

Researchers found there were no ‘significant differences’ between the two groups over the course of a year. From this they conclude there is ‘no evidence of clinical benefit from including emollient bath additives in the standard management of eczema in children’.

The research was published in The BMJ.

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