Is honey a better treatment for coughs and colds than medical medicines and antibiotics? A new review of research says yes – albeit with the caveat that medical medicines do not really offer much relief for sore throats, coughing and sniffing noses. In other words, the bar for success is not very high. (And antibiotics do absolutely nothing for viral infections like colds.)
The treatment of cold with honey may sound a bit hippie-dippy, but it’s been a standard recommendation of doctors for children for a decade. The study on adults and honey is a bit more expensive: Only five of the 14 studies in the new research study, which was published in the journal on 18 August BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, included adult patients, and several of those studies included combination treatments such as honey in coffee, as well as honey-and-herb syrups. (Some of the underlying research was also funded by a honey company.)
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Researchers are not sure why honey can help treat cold symptoms, but it may have something to do with its antioxidants or the fact that it is viscous and thus irritates the throat. However, treating respiratory symptoms with honey is a low-risk endeavor. Honey is also cheap and easy to obtain, said study author Hibatullah Abuelgasim, a fifth-year medical student at Oxford University in England.
“Do no harm first,” said Ian Paul, a professor of pediatrics at Penn State College of Medicine who was not involved in the review but did research on honey and cough in children. Cough and cold medications have side effects, Paul told Live Science, and they do not work well.
The einline? Do not expect honey to do wonders, but do not dismiss it either. It can make the experience of getting a nasty cold just a little less miserable.
History of Honey
Honey has long been a home remedy for soothing throat and soothing coughs – both of which can be grouped as top infections. breathing. It is best known as a treatment for respiratory infection in Ayurveda, the healing tradition of the ancient Vedic culture of India. And honey mixed with hot water and lemon is up there with chicken soup in the pantheon of cold cures that grandma would make.
In 2004, Paul and his colleagues published a study in the journal Pediatrics found that the two most commonly used tea medicines for cough in children, dextromethorphan and diphenhydramine, did not work better than a placebo to make children with cough feel better and sleep at night. And the two drugs had side effects, including drowsiness for some children and difficulty sleeping for others.
“Elsewhere, people were asking me, ‘Well, where can I get that placebo?'” Paul said. “They wanted to give something.”
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So in 2007, Paul and his team followed up with another study, also published in Pediatrics, compare dextromethorphan, honey and no treatment in nocturnal cough in 130 children. They found that honey consistently scored best for reducing cough frequency and pregnancy and improving nighttime sleep over both dextromethorphan and no treatment, according to parent reviews.
That research was supported in part by the sector-funded National Honey Board, but the subsidy was unlimited, meaning the money was given by the board with no input on what kind of research it would be used for.
Other studies in children have shown similar results, including a double-blind, placebo-controlled and randomized study published in Pediatrics in 2012. Double-blind means that neither the children, their parents nor the researchers knew if the children received honey or a flavored placebo, in this case silan date extract. At night one the children received no treatment, and at night two they received either one of three honey products as a placebo. All groups, including the placebo group, felt better on night 2, the researchers reported, but those containing a honey product reported the most improvement. (This study was also funded in part by a group from the honey industry, which again had no say in the design or process of the research.)
In April 2018, the charity Cochrane released a review of all studies on honey and cough in children and concluded that honey is likely to help reduce cough symptoms and improve night sweats more than a placebo in children. (However, honey should never be given to children under the age of 1 because of the risk of botulism in infants.)
Honey for adults?
The new review, led by Abuelgasim, comes to the same conclusions for all ages. Honey is a particularly good alternative to prescribing antibiotics, she wrote; most upper respiratory tract infections are the result of viruses, and antibiotics do nothing against viral infections. In addition, overuse of these drugs leads to antibiotic resistance in microbes. Previous research also finds that there is no strong evidence for over-the-counter cough medicines working in adults, according to a 2014 Cochrane Review.
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The new review draws on various studies on honey in adults. One was a double-blind, randomized control trial in Iran that compared honey plus coffee to a steroid as well as the expectorant guaifenesin (sometimes sold under the brand name Mucinex) to adults with a persistent cough that lasted more than three weeks after a respiratory infection had subsided. The treatment of honey and coffee proved to reduce the frequency of coughs the most, the researchers reported in Nature Primary Care Respiratory Journal. Another study, published in the National Journal of Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology, found that patients with a sore throat felt better faster than honey, received anti-inflammatory drugs, antibiotics and antiseptic gargles than when all those treatments were given without honey. In another study, published in the journal I’m, a honey-containing Ayurvedic cough syrup, similar to a typical anti-cough cough syrup in adults.
“One strength was that the majority of the studies we included were randomized,” Abuelgasim said, referring to the practice of assigning patients to different treatment groups. “Weak points were that some studies had relatively small sample sizes, and some were not blinded,” so participants and / or researchers knew what treatment each person received.
A study not blinded by hiding what treatment patients are receiving is a possible source of bias. The researchers found other potential sources of bias in the studies they examined, including incomplete data from participants who dropped out of the study, and selection bias, which occurs when the individuals surveyed are not representative of the larger population.
One unanswered question is why honey would help cure cold symptoms more than medicines without concept. One possibility is that the antimicrobial ingredients in honey directly fight the pathogen that causes the cold, Paul said. Another is that honey is viscous and coats and irritates an irritated throat. Honey – like most cough syrups – is also sweet, and the part of the brain that processes sweetness is close to the part of the brain that controls cough, so there may be some interaction of nerves or neurotransmitters that calm cough in response. on sugary flavors, Paul said. Sweating also causes salivation, which can thin mucus.
“No one really knows,” Paul said.
Originally published on Live Science.
