Question: what drugs should i give to my kids when i'm older??

Nina Rzechorzek answered on 11 Jun 2019:

This is a really interesting question. Currently, as Rebecca has explained, there is little reason to give any ‘drugs’ to healthy children. However, as we are learning more and more about brain disease, we are realising that it might be necessary to start some ‘treatment approaches’ much earlier in life in order to prevent humans getting e.g. dementia or cancer later on. Such ‘preventative medicine’ approaches might not involve ‘drugs’ in the classical sense, it might involve new types of vaccine, or specific lifestyle choices e.g. diet and exercise levels. I think we are a long way off considering applying such treatments in children – for a start it would be incredibly difficult to run an ethically-sound, well controlled trial over the course of a lifetime to confirm that a ‘treatment’ given in childhood prevented an age-related disorder, and we would have to have a very high level of confidence that no harm would be caused. It also raises important ethical questions – i.e. would you risk causing harm to your child with a preventative treatment for an illness that they might never get in say 50 years time? We have to weigh up the benefits and the risks. Current childhood vaccination programmes protect children from life-threatening infections such as measles, and the risk of a vaccine causing any harm is extremely low – that is why they are recommended and there is a lot of scientific evidence supporting these recommendations.

For age-related diseases, what we can already do is look at people of a certain age, compare those who have with those who have not developed a disease and then ask – what was different about their lifestyle choices, or the drugs/environment factors they might have been exposed to earlier on? This will only ever give us ‘correlative data’ i.e. it will ‘associate’ a disease with certain lifetime risk factors but it cannot prove ’cause and effect’. Similarly we can perform longitudinal ‘cohort’ studies where we take a group of people that share a potential ‘risk factor’ or ‘protective factor’ that we might be interested in and follow them over time to see how many of them develop a disease. Such longitudinal studies clearly take a very long time, can cost a lot of money, and usually require large numbers of people to be studied.

When it comes to your own children, I recommend taking the advice of your GP about what vaccines or supplements to give. One of the biggest campaigns at the moment is about developing ‘resilience’ in kids so that they are better equipped to look after their mental health throughout life – protecting our mental health and wellbeing is just as important as looking after our physical health. I think the meaning of the words ‘drug’, ‘treatment’ and ‘vaccine’ are likely to change a lot over the next 10-20 years as we get better at making diagnoses earlier, and better at developing ‘personalised medicines’.