Bleach baths may ease kids' eczema

By neelampisces

Now researchers at the Northwestern University have found that diluted bleach baths could provide powerful relief from the problem.

Their findings show that adding a small amount of household bleach to a child's bathwater can significantly reduce the itching and rashes caused by eczema, which affects 17 percent of school-age children.

"We’ve long struggled with staphylococcal infections in patients with eczema," said lead researcher Dr. Amy Paller, a specialist in pediatric dermatology and chair of the dermatology department at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

"This study shows that simple household bleach, which we think decreases the staphylococcus on the skin, can help these children," she said.

Pediatric dermatologist Paller conducted one of the first formal studies to examine the treatment along with Jennifer Huang, MD, and colleagues from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

Study details

To reach their discovery, Paller and colleagues followed 31 children between the ages of 6 months and 17 years.

All the study participants had both conditions: AD, the most common form of childhood eczema, as well as a co-infection of MRSA.

All the participants received an identically labeled bleach bottle, but only half of the bottles actually contained bleach. While the study subjects or their parents were able to distinguish whether they have received bleach or the placebo powder by smelling the contents of their bottle, they were instructed not to tell investigators whether they were taking bleach bath or placebo bath.

All the study patients were told to soak in the bleach or placebo baths twice a week.

Paller and colleagues found that the study children who took a bath twice a week with a heavily diluted bleach solution showed a nearly five times greater reduction in eczema severity than those who took the placebo baths after three months.

More precisely, of those using bleach baths 67 percent were more likely to show improvement in their condition, compared with just 15 percent of those who bathed in normal water.

"The eczema kept getting better and better with the bleach baths and these baths prevented it from flaring again, which is an ongoing problem for these kids," Paller said in a statement. "We presume the bleach has antibacterial properties and decreased the number of bacteria on the skin, which is one of the drivers of flares."

The results were so dramatic that the research team stopped the three-month study early so that all the children could benefit from the bleach baths.

The study findings appear in the May issue of the journal Pediatrics.