Otherwise healthy older children and adolescents who visit high-altitude destinations may develop acute mountain sickness in the first few days after they arrive, results of a study indicate.
Their symptoms are apt to be relatively mild – mainly headache, nausea, fatigue, dizziness and trouble sleeping – and will resolve rapidly, the study team reports in the journal Paediatrics.
Travel to high-altitude destinations has become increasingly popular, yet there is little information about acute mountain sickness in children and adolescents, Dr Jonathan Bloch from University Hospital, Lausanne, Switzerland and colleagues point out.
To investigate, they followed 48 healthy Swiss children for several days after they arrived at the Jungfraujoch high-altitude research station. To get to the station, the 20 girls and 28 boys, whose average age was 14 years, ascended by train from 568 metres to 3,450 metres, “an altitude at which major tourist destinations are located throughout the world,” the investigators note. None of the children had previous high-altitude experience.
Overall, 37.5 per cent of the children came down with acute mountain sickness in the first three days at high altitude, Dr Bloch and colleagues report. The rates were similar between boys and girls.
Two thirds of the children with acute mountain sickness developed symptoms during the first few hours at high-altitude. Symptoms decreased progressively during the next two days as the children became acclimatised.
The symptoms of acute mountain sickness were relatively mild, and most resolved without treatment. None of the children with acute mountain sickness had to be evacuated to a lower altitude.
These data, Dr Bloch and colleagues say, indicate that, for children and adolescents with no previous high-altitude experience, symptoms of acute mountain sickness are self-limited and will last for only a short period of time.
Giving children drugs to prevent acute mountain sickness, which may have significant adverse effects, “is not needed”, they conclude. The use of drug therapy should be restricted to the treatment of symptoms (mainly headache) if they appear, the researchers advise.
Reuters Health
Source: Paediatrics, January 2009
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