'Use children as medicine guinea pigs'

Daily Record
Posted: 2007-07-09

CHILDREN should be used as guinea pigs in clinical research, a top paediatrician said yesterday.

Professor John Warner claimed: "If you think something might help children but you are not certain, it is unethical not to do the research.

"You might be depriving a child of something that could do immense good."

Currently, about 40 per cent of medicines prescribed to children and 90 per cent of drugs given to newborn babies have never been tested on them.

Most drug research is carried out on adults because it is easier to get informed consent.

But critics of the process say children aren't just small adults and the effects of drugs can vary widely with age.

Doctors often have to split and crush tablets and make a "best guess" at the dosage.

Prof Warner, head of paediatrics at Imperial College London, said researchers should be designing therapies specifically for kids rather than scaling down treatments created for adults.

He explained that children have different metabolisms, their organs are not as mature as adults' and diseases can behave differently in children's bodies.

Prof Warner said: "A lot of paediatricians' work does not have much of a scientific evidence base and we prescribe drugs by extrapolating from what we know about adult bodies.

"We have a desperate need to understand precisely how children's bodies work so that we can custom-design therapies for them and their problems."