Functional gastrointestinal disorders in infants: to treat, observe or correct?

Abstract

The article discusses the functional disorders of the gastrointestinal tract in infants. The prevalence of functional gastrointestinal disorders is extremely high in all age groups, but in young children, functional diseases are actually a normal variant: mostly, a medical practitioner has to deal with functional digestive disorders in young children, which leads to increased interest of pediatricians in their etiology, pathogenesis and therapy. The most common gastrointestinal disorders are infant colic, regurgitation and constipation — they make up the majority of complaints experienced by parents of children of the first year of life who turn to a pediatrician. Despite the fact that these disorders do not pose a great danger to life and, as a rule, do not significantly affect children’s health in future, they have a significant impact on the quality of life, lead to a large number of unjustified hospitalizations, using excessive pharmacotherapy, and violate the psychological climate in the family. Therefore, it is advisable to carry out the correction of functional gastrointestinal disorders not with the help of medicines, but by prescribing functional food products, in particular breast milk substitutes, which children who are on artificial feeding receive. Questions related to the use of formulas, which are breast milk substitutes, especially those that able to correct minor digestive dysfunctions, are a major trending topic for discussion by clinicians and pediatricians.

Keywords

• functional gastrointestinal disorders
• rome criteria
• regurgitation
• infant colic
• constipation
• functional nutrition