Eczema Skin Symptoms, Medical Causes and Treatments

Eczema

Overview | Treatment | Children

Overview
Eczema can affect people of all ages, but most often affects infants and young children. These children have red skin that itches terribly and can keep the child, and the rest of the family, up all night. Older children and adults often will have thickened, scaly skin that also will itch quite a bit.

What is eczema?
Eczema is very dry, itchy skin that results from too much inflammation in the skin. This can come on quickly with bright red skin and small blisters or open sores with fluid. Eczema can also come on slowly with extremely dry, itchy, cracked skin. Everyone with eczema is prone to skin infection.

Treatment
The most important part of eczema treatment is to moisturize the skin. If this is not enough, anti-inflammatory medicine is applied to the skin. The medicine may be corticosteroid-based creams (variants of hydrocortisone), or newer non-steroid medicines. Before applying anything other than moisturizers, it is important to ask the doctor which creams should be applied to which areas to avoid unwanted side effects. Sometimes avoiding allergy triggers will also help.

Children
Young children with eczema are much more prone than other children to develop asthma, food allergies, and hay fever. If your child has eczema and is coughing at night, it is a good idea to have a doctor evaluate this. If you are concerned about food allergy, a specialist in allergy should be consulted. Testing for food allergy when a child has eczema can be hard to interpret, yet it is very important to have this properly diagnosed and treated.