Echinacea for Kids: You Gotta Be Patient

When the sniffles strike, many parents swear by echinacea for their little ones as well as for themselves. But here’s a surprise: The first large-scale study of echinacea in children has found that it doesn’t lessen their cold symptoms. It may, though, have an important long-term benefit.

Jim Taylor, a pediatrician at the University of Washington in Seattle, enrolled more than 500 kids in a four-month study. As soon as any of the children felt under the weather, parents gave them either echinacea or a fake medicine. Each day, parents tallied the severity of four symptoms: sneezing, coughing, congestion, and runny nose. When the results were in, the kids who took echinacea fared no better than those who hadn’t. Some kids even developed mild skin rashes.

“I was pretty hopeful at the beginning,” says Taylor. “But in the end it was truly disappointing.”

The one potential silver lining is that kids who took echinacea had fewer colds after their first one. “This suggests the echinacea may have stimulated an immune response that lasted longer than the period for which they took it,” Taylor says.

He hopes to explore this preventive possibility in future research. But unless your children tend to be highly allergic, he says there’s no reason not to give them echinacea. Just be prepared for the benefits to take a while to show up.