Eczema bath treatments costing the NHS £23m a year has "no clinical benefit" whatsoever, a British Medical Journal report has found.

Emollient bath additives are estimated to make up as much as a third of the cost of prescribing treating eczema in children in the UK.

The common skin problem is often treated by emollients, which come in the form of leave-on products such as creams, soap substitutes and bath additives.

But to test their effectiveness UK researchers, led by Miriam Santer at the University of Southampton, carried out a trial on 482 children aged between one and 11 who mostly suffered from moderate eczema.

They were split into two groups, one of which used the bath additives in conjunction with the other treatment types over a 16-week period, while the other did not.