KID-SIZED DOSES
New legislation may help you - and doctors - be more confident
of the dose.
[Updated January 2007]

Dosage studies done on adults don't provide doctors with optimal dosing guidelines for children. Rather than guess what the best dose is - and risk guessing wrongly - many doctors choose to not prescribe potentially helpful "adult" drugs. Fortunately, the Pediatric Research Equity Act of 2003 is helping to eliminate the guesswork and giving doctors the information they need to prescribe helpful drugs they might otherwise avoid.

According to the legislation, now signed into law, every drug that might be given to children - even existing drugs - must be tested in children and, if the drug is approved specifically for pediatric use, child-size doses must be included in the prescribing information.

Currently only eight drugs are actually approved for treating juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in children and, therefore, include pediatric dosage ranges in their labeling: celecoxib (Celebrex), choline and magnesium salicylates (Trilisate), etanercept (Enbrel), ibuprofen (Motrin), indomethacin (Indocin), naproxen (Naprosyn) and tolmetin sodium (Tolectin). Studies of many other drugs are under way, says Dowain Wright, MD, medical director of the division of immunology at Children's Hospital Central California in Madera. And the findings of studies on those drugs can help doctors make educated decisions about the best dosages to prescribe for their young patients.

Increasingly doctors are discovering that the drugs that are effective in adults are also effective for children, says Dr. Wright. As more study results are published and more drugs feature pediatric dosages in their labeling, the hope is that more doctors will have the needed information and confidence to prescribe them - and at the safest, most effective dosages - for their juvenile arthritis patients.

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