Newborn omeprazole

[HeidiOH]

My 6 week old daughter has been struggling with what has looked like trapped wind since around 2 weeks. It started off with not being able to be put down in her next to me at night (maximum 1 hour and would take 2 hours to get her off to sleep again) and only able to sleep in her dokatot supervised. She kicks and bring up her legs, grunt strain and cry until we pick her up and comfort her. She is EBF born c-section 37+2. She now will only sleep when being held or asleep on our chests, but this is only done when one of us is awake as we do not feel safe co-sleeping like this (I have been getting an hour a night due to partner working away recently) it is so bad when we place her on her back she lasts seconds or minutes before she is in discomfort. Even during the day when she is being held awake she is uncomfortable and constantly crying or wincing in pain. GP given omeprazole on request which we are day 3 on dispersible tablets, changing to suspension tomorrow as not getting full dose into her due to tablets not dispersing good enough to syringe feed her. I can’t help but feel like it could possibly be something else than reflux. She does not spit up excessively and has now started to just eat little and often and her latch is getting very loose like she does not want to feed. She is always tense in her body and frowning like she is waiting for the pain to come and when it does she cries out. Has anyone else has the same symptoms with their newborn and found omeprazole improved symptoms. Or had another diagnosis with the same sort of symptoms. She is awake during the day but is always looking sad and like she is fed up and just wants to sleep as she’s so uncomfortable.

Hello my daughter has been on omperazole since 8 weeks and will be 5 in August!

It took until 17 weeks before we got her on a dose that was helpful. She had a mix of physical reflux and silent reflux for her then silent reflux was more severe but her GP hadn't picked up on her having silent reflux as well and was just treating the milder physical reflux. She also has multiple food allergies in addition to her reflux and we had to treat both simultaneously to manage her reflux. The GP also hadn't picked up on the cmpa either, she was also breastfeeding and the GP repeated that babies that react to breastmilk get very poorly - true for lactose intolerance not true for cmpa. Ultimately to manage her reflux she needed the highest dose of omperazole, as much gaviscon as I could get in her and a third medication called domperidone which speeds up the emptying of the stomach.

She had feeding aversions and poor latch as a consequence of the food allergies. She basically feed as little as she could as feeding was causing her pain.

Omperazole is a tricky medication to give as it's not very soluble. The best you can do is suspend the beads in solution like a snow globe. We found snapping the tablet in half before dissolving. If dissolving it in 10ml we did 1ml of hot water then 9ml of cooled water helped to get more in solution. Once you have done the dilution e.g take 3ml of the 10ml solution give a 3mg dose you can add more water to the syringe to help get all of the beads out. The important bit is to not do this with water from the system as that would give more of the drug.

I'd give the omperazole a bit of time, keep and eye on the dose. They might need to move up to higher doses to get the benefit. Doses of omperazole range from 0.7 mg/kg to 3 mg/kg so for a 5kg baby the starting dose would be 3.5mg omperazole but if necessary it could be increased to 15mg. I hadn't spotted that my GP was just adjusting the dose for weight gain and wasn't moving her to higher doses when we weren't getting a benefit from it.
It might be worth starting a food diary to see if there is and correlation with you eating dairy and soya. I was mostly vegetarian and it became very clear that 2 days after me eating soya meat replacement products we had a run of bad days.

Had the HV out today and she suspects maybe allergy also. I am going to cut out dairy and have booked a private appointment for next week as the wait is weeks at GP for paediatrician. She has has rash on her face and neck that they put down to baby ance but as I am looking it seems more like a reaction rash now. She also has had a dry face and scaly eyebrows. Very hard to see her go through and feel so helpless. She has seemed worse with her feeding today, screaming and refusing so tempered to take her to A&E

Personally I loathe omeprazole as it hinders the uptake of nutrients and reduces stomach acidity meaning viruses/bacteria are more likely to proliferate without that natural defence.

My dd struggled with with similar and I had to cut out certain foods.

Baby osteopathy was also helpful.

Full sympathy it was a very hard time for me as a parent.

Skin to skin helped when my daughter was like this, if you are struggling to feed or concerned about dehydration it might be worth giving 111 a call for advice

If you remove dairy it's important not to replace it with soya at first, half of babies are allergic to both dairy and soya as the proteins are so similar.