Cramps in children causes

The vision of colic changed one day, when one mother asked for advice about the child's inconsolable crying. After she was diagnosed with colic, she pounced: "Do you call it colic when you do not know why the child hurts?" This mother was right. Physicians and parents are accustomed to write off all the bouts of crying to "colic."When an adult hurts, we play detective stories and track down the cause of the pain in order to eliminate it. What causes colic in despair is that we rarely know the cause and do not know how to correct the situation either. At least until this moment! To determine what concerns your child, take into account the three main possible causes: medical, dietary and emotional. Here is a three-step approach to identifying hidden causes of pain in a child and recommendations for treatment.

Look for the help of your doctor

It should be assumed that the child's pain is attributed to a hidden disease if the following occurs:

• The schedule of crying attacks in the child sharply changes, and the seizures become greater.

• The child often wakes up from pain.

• Crying has the character of frequent, prolonged, uncontrollable seizures and is not limited to evening hours.

• Your parental intuition tells you: "My child has something hurts."

If you decide that a visit to a doctor is competent, here are some measures that you can take to squeeze as much of the doctor out as possible.

Cry the

dossier Before going to the doctor, compile the dossier, referring to the following questions:

• Is the pain so strong for the child to terrify him and you? Or is he just acting tearfully?

• When did the bouts of crying begin, how long do they last and how often do they happen?

• What causes an attack and what stops it? Whether there are attacks at night?

• Describe the crying.

• Where do you think the pain comes from? What does your child's face, belly and extremity look like during an attack?

• Describe in detail how you are breastfeeding: breast or bottle, frequency of feeding, ingestion of air. What changes have you tried to make in the feeding techniques or what mixtures have you tried? What gave a positive result? Do you hear your child swallowing air?

• Does your child release a lot of gases?

• What is the chair for your child - does it go easy on the pot, is it not too soft or too hard stool - and how often?

• Does your baby regurgitate? How often, after what time after feeding and with what strength?

• Does your child have any non-treatable diaper rash and how do they look? Is there a red,

inflamed diaper in the form of a ring around the anus?(This indicates a sensitivity to any food.)

Specify in detail the home remedies. What worked and what not?

Propose your diagnosis.

Keep a diary of colic

Write in the diary, with all the bright details, as much information about the pain episodes in your child, based on the above list of questions. You may be surprised at what kind of relationship you find. One mother remarked: "In those days when I most of the time carry it on me, he forgets to raise a cry with the arrival of the evening."

Write down your problem on the

cassette. To help your doctor assess how terrible your child's colic is, write one of your child's tantrums on an audio cassette. Because there is such a rich body language, accompanying screaming, if you want to bring your panic to the doctor in full, write yourself with the child during an attack of colic on a video cassette so that your doctor, from whom you are looking for advice, could really see that the mother andthe child is suffering. This has a very strong therapeutic effect on the parents when they occasionally watch their recording to assess the child's suffering and see how they behave in this situation.

Tell me how is

Do not hide how much your child's crying disturbs you. The doctor should come and mother and father. Fathers make mothers be sincere, not allowing them to pretend that the child's crying does not worry them so much. Perhaps mothers think that such recognition will shake their image of an ideal mother in the eyes of their child's pediatrician. Fathers usually say it as it is. When a couple came to see me for a colic, I underestimated the scale of the problem, and my father blurted out: "Last week, I did a vasectomy. We do not have to go through this nightmare a second time! ".

Do not lose faith in your doctor if he or she can not determine why your child hurts, or can not heal your child from bouts of sudden pain. When I see my parents and their colicky child, it hurts me for them, it hurts me for their child, and besides, I feel completely sloppy when I can not identify the cause and prescribe a remedy that will instantly cure everything. Often the best thing your doctor can do is to make a detailed medical history record, send for a full medical examination and, if a hidden problem is not found, offer a trial and error method based on the exclusion of certain foods from the diet, as well as the detective work together with the treatmenttime.(However, we are convinced that it is important first of all to perceive seizures of sudden pain as a disease that can be attributed to the general category "the child hurts," otherwise pain-related diseases that can be treated may be disregarded.)

Identify discomfort-causing foods

Causewhether products from which there are winds, bloating of a stomach at children? Each experienced nursing mother has a list of foods that cause discomfort for her child - those foods that, if she eats them, can cause her baby's attacks of sudden pain. Suspicious products include gas-causing vegetables, dairy products, products containing caffeine, some cereals and nuts, among others.

It can cause discomfort in the child, not only what is contained in breast milk, but also how it is fed to the baby. Overfeeding - not the most frequent, but still noteworthy cause of excess gases in the intestines. If the baby is given too much milk too quickly, this can lead to an overabundance of lactose and an increase in the amount of gases in the intestine due to the decomposition of excess lactose. The digestion of a child can become easier if you offer a mixture of in smaller portions more often or give one one breast to ( assuming, of course, that with this change in the feeding regime the child will receive adequate nutrition).

The connection between bouts of pain and cow milk

Now, scientific research confirms what grandmothers have long suspected. Some children experience symptoms similar to sudden pain episodes if their mothers who breastfeed drink cow's milk. Studies have shown that potentially allergenic beta-lactoglobulin, contained in cow's milk, passes through the breast milk of a woman into the baby's body. This allergen causes discomfort in the intestines, as if the baby has just drunk cow's milk. One study showed that with the exclusion of foods made from cow's milk from the ration of nursing mothers, the symptoms of colic decline in about a third of children. Another study showed that there is no dependence between mothers drunk cow milk and sudden pain episodes in their

children. Many mothers whose children we see report that anxiety and colic in a child abruptly disappear when they exclude dairy products from their food and are again observed after they re-inject cow milk into their diet. If your child's pain attacks are caused by dairy or any other foods that you consume, the symptoms of colic usually appear three to four hours after you have eaten a suspicious product and disappear after one or two days from being excluded from the diet.

Some mothers are forced to exclude all dairy products completely, including ice cream, butter or margarine made with the addition of whey( see the formulation on the labels, the dairy ingredients include casein, whey and sodium caseinate).Others can simply reduce the amount of milk they drink and still eat yoghurt and cheese without causing discomfort to the child. Perhaps one of the reasons that colic disappears at the age of about four months is the fact that by this time the intestines of the child are becoming mature enough to not allow the passage of numerous food allergens into the bloodstream. The connection between dairy and other products consumed by the nursing mother, and the painful symptoms in her child is established relatively recently and still requires further research. I think it will be confirmed that this relationship takes place much more often than is generally accepted today.

Be objective

In its quest to name the cause of colic anything, aggravated by the desire of everyone around to find a magical remedy, it's easy to let your objectivity fog and blame the blame on dairy or other products. In our experience, we can say that if a child is allergic to dairy products is strong enough to cause colic, the child will have other manifestations of allergy - for example, rash, diarrhea, runny nose, nighttime awakenings - symptoms that remain after colicover.

Here is another clue against the discomforting products. Sensitivity to milk or other foods consumed by the lactating mother or sensitivity to artificial infant formula usually affects the stool of the child. Frequent, green, sticky stools( or, conversely, constipation), accompanied by a red, allergic, ring around the anus of the baby, indicates sensitivity. If you exclude from the food product-culprit, which may be a dairy product, the child's chair will become almost normal, and the painful diaper around the anus will pass.

Allergy to artificial infant formula and colic

Children who are fed infant formulas based on cow's milk may experience colic if they have sensitivity to cow's milk as an allergen. The does not recommend to give colicky children with soya beans because of the high likelihood that children who are allergic to proteins

Gastroesophageal reflux: a latent cause of colic

Gastroesophageal reflux, or gastroesophageal refluxreflux, also called esophageal reflux, most recently fell into the list of hidden causes of colic and nocturnal awakenings. Strictly irritating stomach acids regurgitate into the esophagus, causing pain similar to that which adults call heartburn. Repetition occurs more in a horizontal position, which explains the fact that the pain is stronger when the child lies, and more often the child experiences relief in an upright position.

Symptoms indicating reflux

• frequent attacks of painful screaming - "not as babies usually shout"

• frequent cases of regurgitation after feeding, including also a powerful discharge of milk through the nose

• frequent attacks of abdominal pain accompanied by inconsolable crying, during the dayand at night

• nightly awakenings from sudden pain

• anxiety after eating;the child pulls the legs to the chest

• the child arches with an arch or writhes as if it hurts something

• the behavior becomes more relaxed when the baby is worn in the upright position and put to sleep on the tummy, supporting the pillows at an angle of thirty degrees

• frequent unexplained coldsdiseases, wheezing and inflammation of the lower respiratory tract

• respiratory arrest

Note: A child with reflux may have only a few of these signs. In some cases, the child can only partially throw the contents of the stomach into the esophagus( milk does not travel all the way up the esophagus) and therefore it may not be visible that it burps. Some children are so tired, crying all day long that they sleep well at night. From my experience I can say that gastroesophageal reflux is often overlooked as a hidden cause of pain in young children.

If a diagnosis of gastroesophageal reflux is suspected, the diagnosis can be confirmed by inserting a cord into the child's esophagus( which causes minimal discomfort), which is left here for a period of twelve to twenty-four hours, constantly measuring the amount of stomach acids that are stored in cow's milk, as wellmay be allergy to soy. If you suspect an allergy to artificial mixture, you should try a mixture made on the basis of pre-processed milk, recommended by your doctor( Alimentum or Nutramigen).

Do not smoke, please

Colic happens more often in children whose mothers or fathers smoke or if a nursing mother smokes. Excreted in the esophagus. Since normally about one in three babies has a certain degree of reflux, a simple measurement of gastric acids is not enough to confirm that reflux is the cause of pain in a child. For this reason, the parent or a specially trained healthcare professional records the time of onset of colic episodes in the child. If the seizures coincide in time with the transfer of the contents of the stomach into the esophagus, the hidden cause of colic is found. If the diagnosis of gastroesophageal reflux is obvious from your child's symptoms, your doctor may decide to start treatment without exposing the baby to measuring acidity. Treatment of gastroesophageal reflux

• After feeding and for sleep, put the baby for half an hour on the tummy, propping the pillows at an angle of thirty degrees. The lying position on the abdomen is most effective - if the

just puts the child vertically in the baby car seat, it will give almost nothing. On sale there is a special baby bag-sling that keeps the baby in position on the stomach on an angled mattress cot.• Condense the baby's food, for example by giving him rice porridge during or after breastfeeding or adding it to a bottle with an artificial mixture.

• Arrange for the child less voluminous, more frequent feeding, instead of giving him very much at once( the milk has an antacid effect).

• Give your child prescribed medication to neutralize acids or to accelerate their removal from the esophagus.

• Carry the child as much as possible so that he will cry less. During crying, the children regurgitate more.

• Breastfeeding. Studies have shown that children who receive breastfeeding suffer from less gastroesophageal reflux.

One of the most experienced mothers in my practice of wearing a baby in a bag believes that if she wears her baby after feeding, it "makes digestion";that easy movement and closeness to the mother contribute to the functioning of the digestive system. I share this belief. Perhaps, it is for this reason that cats are licked after feeding the tummies of their kittens. In most children, gastroesophageal reflux by six months becomes less pronounced, and by the first birthday disappears altogether. Some children still need treatment, or they have not even been diagnosed yet, to an older age.

Preparing for the "happy hour"

To survive the evening colic, prepare an evening meal in advance. Frozen ready casseroles and colicky children are quite compatible. If you arrange a child( and yourself) to sleep at the end of the day, it sometimes softens the evening attack and recharges you, so that you have the strength to carry around with the baby in case he bursts into tears. If you carry the child on yourself for an hour or two before the evening, this can relax the child enough to save you from an evening attack.

Researchers believe that the discomfort causes the child not only nicotine penetrating into the mother's milk, but also passive smoking - cigarette smoke in the house acts as an irritant. The children of the smoking parents behave more restlessly, and the smoking mother may be less able to manage with the child who has colic. Recent studies have shown that mothers who smoke have a lowered level of prolactin, a hormone that increases maternal sensitivity and allows the mother to show resilience at critical moments.

Think if there are emotional reasons for colic

After years of suffering along with colicky children and their parents, after studying the research on this issue, we came to the conclusion that colic has many causes: physiological, nutritional and emotional.

Colic - is not disease as such

Can colic be a problem of the development of the nervous system, not just the intestines? Do not we glue the colic to the wrong end of the child? Some children have colic - this is behavior, not disease, and certainly not an incurable disease. This is what the child is doing, not what he has. Colic is one article in a huge book about restless or high-need children who have an extremely sensitive, active, unorganized, hard-adjusting temperament, which we call the tendency to colic. This tendency will grow into a col- lective behavior or not, depends, to a certain extent, on the environment that the child will face.

Is colic connected with biorhythm failure?

Well-being is provided to every person by biorhythms - internal precise clocks that automatically produce hormones regulating the functioning of our body and control daily changes in our body temperature and sleep-wake cycles. When our biorhythms are debugged, we feel good and act as expected. When our biorhythms fail - for example, if the daily rhythm of our organism is disturbed during the flight through several time zones, - we begin to behave "restlessly".

Some children come to this world with poorly adjusted biorhythms. We say that they do not have an internal routine, that they are unorganized. Other children are born well organized and expect from caring people about them that they will help them stay organized. The failure of hopes to become organized or to remain so leads to a change in behavior, which we call colic. Perhaps there is a group of organizing hormones that make a child get used to the order. If these organizing hormones are absent, the children's internal routines are disrupted. Instead of behaving restlessly all the time, they only periodically give themselves the will by rolling up tantrums, or store a day's supply of tension, to release it with one long evening cry.

Can colic be the result of a deficiency of soothing hormones or an excess of hormones knocking out of the rut? The theory that the cause of colic is the failure of biorhythms, has some experimental confirmation. The newborn babies participating in the experiment, separated from their mothers, showed disruptions in the development of the adrenal hormones, which are regulatory for the body.

Progesterone is a hormone known for its calming and hypnotic effects. During childbirth, the child receives progesterone from the placenta. Could it be that the reserve of maternal progesterone runs out after about two weeks( when colic usually begins), which leads to colic if the child has not yet begun to produce enough progesterone in its own right? Some studies have shown that in children with colic, the level of progesterone is low;when these children were given a drug similar to progesterone, the behavior of these children improved. Other studies have yielded results that did not clearly outline the picture. In one study, it was found that in children receiving breastfeeding, the level of progesterone is higher.

Prostaglandins - hormones that cause severe contractions of the intestinal muscles, have entered the theory of biorhythm failures quite recently. Researchers who injected prostaglandins for two children to treat heart disease accidentally found that both children began to suffer from colic. Observations that children born as a result of difficult births are more likely to become nervous, confirm these hormonal theories.

And the last layer of glaze on the pie called "Biorhythms."Kolika magically passes at the age of about three or four months, at the same time when the child's sleep mode becomes stable and his biorhythms become more streamlined. Do not see any connection? We are personally convinced that restless behavior and colic in some, but not in all, children are behavioral and physiological manifestations of the fact that internal regulatory systems are out of order. It takes a lot of research to confirm the relationship between the hormones that regulate the functioning of the body and the behavior of the child, as well as the influence of parental care on these substances. Until the results of these studies are obtained, we can only rely on common sense - that if the child is held and nursed, he behaves more calmly.