Peculiarities of mucoactive therapy in pediatric practice

Abstract

Cough is one of the most common symptoms in daily pediatric practice. Clinical presentation of cough in children may vary from a slight cough that has almost no impact on well-being and behaviour, to a strong, painful one that disrupts sleep and overall health status, which significantly worsens the child’s quality of life. Cough is a multidisciplinary problem due to a wide variety of causes, that’s why in the clinical pediatric practice there are certain difficulties in verifying the diagnosis, especially in children with prolonged cough, and in selecting the optimal treatment. The need for mucoactive therapy and the choice of a drug primarily depend on the cause and nature of the cough, the features of the development of the cough reflex in childhood, as well as the mechanisms of action of the drugs used. The main purpose of mucoactive drugs is to restore mucociliary clearance and effectively eliminate secretions from the respiratory tract, but apart from them some drugs have a few additional properties. The article presents the main causes of acute and chronic cough in children and considers the modern therapy options to treat cough. Ambroxol is one of the most commonly used mucoactive drugs to treat cough in children due to its pronounced mucolytic, expectorant, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and immunomodulatory activity, as well as stimulation of surfactant synthesis. Ambroxol has been shown to have efficacy and favourable safety profile in numerous international and Russian studies. A wide choice of dosage forms, which provide different routes of medication administration, allows to use Ambroxol in children with acute and chronic bronchopulmonary diseases from an early age.