At the beginning of the year we announced the news of the new law that forced pharmacists to research and develop specific drugs for children, not to administer any medication to the child population without having performed clinical trials with exceptions of undesirable or unnecessary cases.
One of the difficulties that must be encountered is in the field of cardiology, where fortunately pediatric cases are scarce and trials are omitted because of the risk involved.
This is also commented in El Mundo Salud, where we read the conclusion of a study that we all already imagine, a drug that treats heart failure in adults does not offer the same benefits to the pediatric patient.
It is really a difficult job to conduct clinical trials in children for several reasons, so many diseases that children suffer are treated with the same medications that would be administered to an adult but in lower doses. It is necessary to end this, as the outcome may not always be as expected. At the moment, researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, together with researchers from different US universities, make it clear that carvelidol, a medication that is usually used in cases of heart failure, does not perform the desired effect in almost half of treated children . The conclusion is the result of the study of 161 children with an average age of 4 years and suffering from systolic heart failure.
Researchers do not understand why this drug benefits adults and not children, although they consider the possibility that it is because heart failure originates in a different way.
However, the study published in JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) offers preliminary data, the problem is that the final conclusion can be given with an evaluation of more than 500 patients, but fortunately it is difficult to group so many children with this disorder
Specific drugs for children remain a pending subject in many health fields, but it is not an easy subject.
