According to new research steroids given to children who are wheezing due to viral or other infections don't get any relief but could harm the child.

Wheezing is a problem that almost one third of the pre-schoolers develop and 75 % outgrow the problem by the time they reach the age of 6. Doctors in the past treated wheezing much as they did asthma and corticosteroids were the prescribed medicine.

Two recent studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine have found that prescribing corticosteroids to wheezing children can do them more harm than good while an experimental treatment may be more effective in treating wheezing.

In one study Dr. Jonathan Grigg of Queen Mary University in London and colleagues tested nearly 700 children between the ages of 10 months to 5 years. They found that children who were prescribed a five day course of the steroid prednisolone stayed just as long in hospital as children given a placebo and there was no difference seen in their symptoms over the next seven days.

"If your child is very sick, it doesn't mean you shouldn't give oral steroids. But in the general run of things, for most kids at home or presenting to their doctor with moderate wheezing that doesn't require many days in the hospital, steroids are not going to be of any benefit," Grigg said. He added that the result "does fit into the general perception that preschool wheeze is very different from attacks of allergic asthma in older children and adults."

The research was paid for by the nonprofit Asthma UK. Several authors report receiving fees and support from various drug makers that make asthma medication.

In the second study was conducted by Dr. Francine Ducharme of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire in Montreal and colleagues. The researchers compared GlaxoSmithKline's Flovent, available generically as fluticasone, with a placebo in 129 children aged 1 to 6 years. The children were treated twice daily for 10 days as soon as they showed the first indication of nasal congestion, sore throat or other symptoms that might indicate an upper respiratory tract infection.

The researchers noted that 18 % of the children in the placebo group needed to be treated with steroid drugs while in the children in the Flovent group only 8 % needed steroid treatment. There was one area of concern where the children on the drug Flovent were seen to grow a tenth of an inch (or one third of a centimeter) less over a period of ten months as compared to the children on the placebo.

"There is concern about patients overusing the drugs," Ducharme said. GlaxoSmithKline released a statement saying that the dose of Flovent was well above the recommended range for treating asthma in children of that age, and added that the drug is not approved for treating wheezing. The company helped fund the study said, "These results may help inform future research efforts into viral-induced wheezing."

In an accompanying editorial Dr. Andrew Bush of the Royal Brompton Hospital in London wrote, "It is disturbing to contemplate how many unnecessary courses of prednisolone have been given over the years, in good faith, because we all assumed that preschool children are little adults."

Pediatrician Dr. Sami Bahna of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport said in the case of wheezing children who do not have asthma "The majority will do well without intervention," Bahna said.