Study: Saline Nose Drops Reduce Duration Of The Common Cold In Kids

Ah, winter. The time of year where it seems like there’s never an hour when every member of your family is healthy, and at least one person has a head cold at all times. It can be a misery of missed school, missed work, and sleepless nights.

But what if there were a pretty simple, all-natural, and scientifically proven way to shorten your kids’ colds? A new study published in European Respiratory Society has found an answer, and it’s as easy as some salt water.

Researchers have found that applying saline drops to a sick kid’s nose four times a day shortens the symptoms by two full days — and decreases the likelihood of spreading the cold to others in the household by 20%.

The study involved over 300 kids, who were either given 2.6% saline nasal drops or cared for in the usual way.

The salt water nose drops were applied four times per day, three drops per nostril, until well.

The results? The children who received salt water drops had symptoms for six days, while those without the drops were sick for eight days. In addition, families members in the saline drop families caught a cold only 46% of the time vs. 61% of the time under usual usual care.

Finally, the kids with saline drops needed less other medicine during their sickness, like cough medicine and pain killers.

“Salt is made up of sodium and chloride,” explained Professor Steve Cunningham from Child Life and Health, University of Edinburgh, and a researcher on the study. “Chloride is used by the cells lining the nose and windpipes to produce hypochlorous acid within cells, which they use to defend against virus infection. By giving extra chloride to the lining cells this helps the cells produce more hypochlorous acid, which helps suppress viral replication, reducing the length of the virus infection, and therefore the duration of symptoms.”

The treatment is also easy on parents. Over 80% said that their kids got better faster, and 82% said that they would use the treatment in the future.

Over on TikTok, our favorite pediatric emergency room doctor Megan Martin, MD, added some good context to the study, reminding everyone not to use anything but distilled water in your nasal passages. And that the easiest way to purchase the right concentration of salt is to get “extra strength.”

She also added that although the study focused on kids six and younger, there’s no science-based reason that this treatment wouldn’t work the same exact way for adults. In the same vein, it should also work for other viruses that affect the respiratory system, including COVID.

“This is cheap, this is easy, and this is low-risk,” she concludes.

So good to have another tool in our toolbox for the next time one of our kids gets sick (spoiler alert: it’s probably tomorrow).