Steroids are not effective when it comes to treating infants with bronchiolitis, a common and potentially fatal viral lower respiratory infection, as per a new study co-authored by Dr. Joan Bregstein of the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York-Presbyterian and Columbia University Medical Center.

The multicenter study that was conducted by the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) was able to found out that steroid treatment is unable to prevent hospitalization or improve respiratory symptoms for bronchiolitis.

Some of the possible symptoms of bronchiolitis are coughing, runny nose, wheezing, and fever.

From News-Medical.Net:

“Our study shows that treating bronchiolitis with steroids doesn’t work. We hope this study will resolve some of the uncertainty for physicians and families, as we move forward in developing better means of preventing and treating the infection,” says Dr. Bregstein, site principal investigator and emergency medicine pediatrician at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian and assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Current recommendations suggest that simple supportive care is the best available treatment for bronchiolitis. Researchers note that steroid-based medications still play an important role in other respiratory illnesses of childhood such as asthma and croup. They point out these medications are not the androgenic steroids sometimes abused by athletes, and that the side effects seen with long-term steroid use are not a risk in the short-course treatments used for croup and asthma attacks.

The study on bronchiolitis was led for PECARN by the University of Utah’s Department of Pediatrics and Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City.