A new clinical trial has just shown that ECHINACEA tablets (400 mg Echinacea purpurea) may well work better than VITAMIN C for preventing cold symptoms, reducing the risk for complications (sinusitis, ear infection, and pneumonia), and reducing antibiotic use in children age 4-12.
But read on for more nuance…
In this study, 103 children were given Echinacea and 98 children vitamin C (50 mg – note this is a comparatively low dose and a higher dose may have generated different outcomes). The results were:
– 429 cold days in the echinacea group compared with 602 in the vitamin C group.
– 6 courses of antibiotics (totaling 45 days) in the echinacea group compared with 24 in the vitamin C group (totaling 216 days).
– 11 cold complications in the echinacea group compared with 30 in the vitamin C group.
Bottom line: This study adds nicely to the evidence supporting echinacea’s effectiveness in reducing the risk for colds. Although it looks like vitamin C performs worse than echinacea, the dose used in this study was very low (200 mg or more seems to be needed to achieve better results, including shortened cold duration).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33832544/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/cold-and-flu/can-vitamin-c-prevent-a-cold
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