Grumpy kiddo = grumpy parents.
Colic is the term used to describe intense, uncontrollable crying in a healthy young baby. It is quite common, affecting sixteen percent (16%) of infants studied. It is difficult, if not impossible, to soothe a colicky baby and the crying jags can continue for several hours.
A great friend sent me the link to a recent story published on National Public Radio (NPR), Can Probiotics Sooth a Colicky Baby?. As a parent of a newborn, she was very interested to read that colic can possibly be prevented or improved by giving a baby probiotics. Furthermore she knows that this topic is dear to my heart. Following a round of antibiotics when he was only two weeks old, my son became very colicky and soon thereafter became a problematically picky eater. We believe that the antibiotics that we gave him at an early age upset the establishment of good bacteria in his digestive tract and that subsequently triggered other problems (you can read more about it here and here).
The NPR article highlights how devastating colic can be for parents who are already struggling with sleep deprivation and the anxiety of recent parenthood. The author, Rob Stein, cites colic as a cause of serious depression for parents. However, the article gives some very encouraging news. There have been recent medical studies that have found that giving probiotics to colicky babies can improve their symptoms and possibly prevent it in the first place.
If you are interested in delving in deeper into the science on this topic, I recommend reading an article describing recent research on colic and probiotics published in the JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association) Pediatrics study, which is mentioned in this NPR story. Dr. Flavia Indrio and her colleagues found that giving a daily dose of Lactobacillus reuteri (a probiotic) to brand new babies (less than one week old), even before they show colic symptoms, seems to prevent colic from developing.
The researchers kept up the daily probiotic dose for three months. The researchers also looked at the issues of constipation and regurgitations (spitting-up) in the same study. One randomly chosen group of babies received five drops of the formulation that contained sunflower oil and one hundred million (100,000,000) colony-forming units of L reuteri (a probiotic) and the control group received five drops of the oil only.
After ninety days, the infants who received the probiotic showed significantly decreased crying time, significantly increased evacuation (bowel movement) frequency and significantly reduced regurgitations (spitting-up) than did the control group. At the end of the study, the group that received the probiotic had significantly fewer pediatric emergency department visits, fewer lost parental working days, and less use of treatments to reduce abdominal discomfort than the control group. If you are a parent living with a colicky infant you can appreciate that this is pretty exciting research!
There are currently infant probiotics on the market, some of which contain the probiotic L. reuteri, in the same concentration as the researchers above studied. Listen to or read the NPR story here.
We would love to hear from you in the comments below if you have tried them with your baby and what, if anything, you noticed.
Your article reminded me about the horrible colic that my daughter had in the late 1960s when we were in Germany when she was a brand new baby and was wondering to myself whether there had been a tie in with the fact that she was put on antibiotics when she was really young. I remembered that when she was in the nursery, there was another little baby who was later discovered to have had pneumonia. Sadly he died a day or so after she was with him in the nursery.
A few days later my daughter came down with a respiratory infection which wasn’t all that bad, but I brought her to the doctor immediately because she was running a fairly high fever, and I wanted to be careful given the pneumonia. The doctor did a nasal culture on her and discovered that she had also developed pneumonia, and prescribed antibiotics. Because of the antibiotics, she never really had any significant problems with the pneumonia at all and thankfully was healthy baby a few days later.
Back then they probably put her on penicillin. Now looking back, I wonder whether she developed the colic from having the antibiotic wipe out her gut bugs. I can’t remember whether her colic started instantly when we brought her home from the hospital before she got sick, but I think it did. I also can’t remember how many weeks old she was when she developed the pneumonia so there may be no tie in with antibiotics.
All I know is that she was never able to burp and get any gas out no matter how much we patted her on her back and rubbed her back. So every time she nursed, we knew we were in for at least an hour of screaming and often it was closer to two hours, as I recall. Her little body would just writhe in pain as she tried to get comfortable. In an hour or two, she would settle down and be OK again until the next time she was fed. She was only a tiny bit over 6 pounds when she was born so she was nursing about every 3 hours. Her Dad and I ended up getting only an hour of sleep in between feedings. She was born on early April 8th and the colic ended on July 4th, never to return. It was bizarre! I’ve remember going to my husband’s company picnic on the US Army post and having her scream bloody murder while she were passed around from wife to wife of the army men who were sure that they knew how to get her to stop. Did it work? It certainly did not!
Colic is really a horrible thing for not only a little baby but also family members. It is so hard to watch an infant who is in absolute agony. I remember my baby’s teeny tiny little legs just straightening out and then going into a fetal position and just moving and moving and kicking and kicking. It was very sad to see. Talk about feeling helpless! And there was certainly maternal guilt in there too. I couldn’t imagine how everybody else patted their babies and got burps and I couldn’t seem to find the magic spot. It was definitely a hard time for all of us. After the colic ended on July 4th, life was much improved for the whole family.