What We Don’t Know About Medicine and Kids

Kids aren’t just tiny adults, but they’re often treated that way when they get sick. Despite a recent effort to learn more about how medicine affects kids differently than adults, most drugs given to children still haven’t been studied in pediatric settings, the Washington Post reports.

“Are there children dying because of this? I don’t know. Are there children being less effectively treated because of this? Probably yes. But I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” Richard L. Gorman of the American Academy of Pediatrics told the WaPo. “That’s the problem: We don’t know what we don’t know.”

Financial incentives created by Congress have prompted the drug industry to begin studying more of its products in kids, and NIH has been spending about $25 million a year to study the highest priority drugs. Some drugs have unexpected side effects in children, while others are ineffective or require different dosages than doctors had been using. But drug studies are expensive and NIH has only managed to launch studies on 14 out of 50 top priority drugs.

“We’ve sort of cobbled together studies as best we can based on the resources we have available,” Donald R. Mattison, chief of the obstetric and pediatric pharmacology branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told the paper.