How do we know that the new antihistamines are better? There has
been lots of research which shows this, but two experiments are specially
interesting.
Road safety experiment
In one set of experiments, drivers had to drive along a motorway for 100
kilometres. They had to drive at a steady speed and keep as near to the middle of
the slowest lane (the left hand lane, as it was in the Netherlands) as they
could. A video camera on the roof of the car filmed the white line on the road.
When they got back, the video tape was played, and the movement of the white line
on the screen was measured.
In some tests the drivers took an old antihistamine, and in other tests they took
a new one or a dummy tablet.
The old antihistamines made the drivers wobble more during driving, sometimes to
a dangerous extent, so that the test drive had to be stopped. (They used dual
control cars, and had permission to stop on the hard shoulder of the road when
this happened.) Old antihistamines were frankly dangerous.
New antihistamines caused no increase in wobbling compared to the dummy
tablets.
Alcohol, even within the legal limit for driving, also made steering more wobbly.
But the new antihistamines together with alcohol were no worse than the alcohol
alone.
So the new antihistamines are much safer for drivers.
Learning experiment in children with hayfever
Schoolchildren with hayfever were divided into three groups. For the experiment,
during the hayfever season, children in the first group took dummy tablets. Those
in the second group took an old antihistamine. Children in the third group took a
new antihistamine, Triludan.
All the children then sat in front of computers. They used a computer program
which taught them about farming in the Sahel Desert. As the children were from
the town of Maastricht in the Netherlands, this meant they knew nothing about
this at the beginning.
When the children had finished learning, they played a computer game. Guess what?
The game was about - farming in the Sahel desert. Depending how well they did,
each child got a score.
Here are the results. The children whose hayfever was treated with the old
antihistamine did WORSE than the ones who just got dummy tablets. The sleepiness,
or inattentiveness did more harm to how they did than hayfever alone.
But the children who took the new antihistamine, Triludan, did BETTER than the
children who took dummy tablets. This shows that hayfever by itself harms
learning, and that treating the hayfever undoes this harm, provided the treatment
does not make the children sleepy.
Both sets of experiments were done by the team of Professor O'Hanlon, of
Maastricht, Netherlands. If he'd let me use some photographs of these
experiments, I would show them to you on the web.
Many other experimens have shown similar results.