Children across Tayside and Fife who suffer from eczema are about to be recruited for research by Dundee University.
GP practices will be helping academics find 170 children for the study. Atopic eczema affects one in three children in the UK but it is not clear if the £60 million spent every year on antibiotic treatments for it is having any effect.
The project, called CREAM (Children with Eczema Antibiotic Management) will be headed up by Professor Frank Sullivan, head of population health sciences at the university.
He said: “Eczema flares are sometimes thought to be caused by bacterial infections but we do not actually know whether antibiotics reduce eczema severity in these children or whether the cream or the syrup works better.
“We need to gather much better information on the effectiveness or otherwise of these antibiotic treatments for eczema.
The CREAM study has been funded with a £1.2 million grant from the Health Technology Assessment Programme.
The Dundee team will work with colleagues from Cardiff and Bristol.
* The university is also coordinating a £2.3m European project that aims to find out if advanced laser techniques can be used to detect and treat bladder cancer.
Early experiments have discovered that cancerous cells and healthy cells respond differently when exposed to certain infra-red light. The project will work to exploit this difference.
The project brings together experts from the university’s medical school and photonics and nanoscience group with firms in the Netherlands and Russia.