You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Therapeutics/Prevention
Systematic review
There is no good evidence for the effectiveness of commonly used over-the-counter medicine to alleviate acute cough
  1. An De Sutter
  1. Department of Family Medicine and Primary Health Care, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
  1. Correspondence to : Dr An De Sutter, Department of Family Medicine and Primary Health Care, Ghent University, Ghent 9000, Belgium; an.desutter{at}UGent.be

https://doi.org/10.1136/ebmed-2014-110156

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Commentary on: Smith SM, Schroeder K, Fahey T. Over-the-counter (OTC) medications for acute cough in children and adults in community settings. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2014;11:CD001831.OpenUrlPubMed

    Context

    Acute cough is common and the demand for (and sale of) over-the-counter (OTC) cough medication is high, even for young children where serious side effects have been described.1 Keeping the evidence up-to-date is very important.

    Methods

    The authors searched CENTRAL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, LILACS, Web of Science and the UK Department of Health National Research Register for randomised controlled trials comparing oral OTC cough medications to placebo in adults and children. Six types of cough medicines were reviewed and included: antitussives, expectorants, mucolytics, antihistamine decongestant combinations, antihistamines and other combinations. The effectiveness of honey was also reviewed. Selected studies were independently reviewed by two authors. The risk of bias was assessed.

    Findings

    The authors included 29 trials, …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.