JOE BATOR / CORBIS

The Journal: Journal of Advanced Nursing

The Study: More than half of feverish children are medicated incorrectly by their parents.

Australian researchers combed through more than 70 studies published worldwide in the past 20 years to see how parents' medication habits had changed over time and found that, overall, the trend has been towards increased medication. Even though the proportion of parents giving their children correct doses has increased (from about a third in the 1980s to nearly half in the most recent studies), more than half of children are still not treated properly.

Most alarmingly, the investigators found the percentage of parents giving their children overdoses—doses either too high or too frequent—has increased dramatically: 33% of parents now overdose their feverish kids, compared to 12% in 1987.

What It Means: A growing number of parents seem to believe that if a little medicine is good, more must be better. The study's authors suggest a major reason is inaccurate temperature readings or uncertainty about about the child's normal temperature, which leads parents to think the child is  sicker than he or she actually is.

The researchers recommend treating children based on overall well-being, rather than just thermometer measurements. The researchers also found some parents were administering different medicines simultaneously, like acetaminophen and ibuprofen, if one didn't seem to be effective immediately.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, younger children and low-weight children are more likely to be under-dosed than others. That might be because parents overcompensate for their children's small size, cutting the recommended dosages by too much.

From the Archive:
01/10/2005 What Risks Lurk in Your Medicine Cabinet?
07/05/2004 Curbing the Drug Marketers