7mo lost a lot of weight with cold

[BanjoHannah]

7mo baby has a cold, been dragging on for ten days and he's gone off food and milk quite a bit, though has been drinking enough to have wet nappies so not dehydrated.

I hadn't weighed him for a couple of months but he was following his curve beautifully, so assuming he was still following it he would have weighed 10.7 kg. I weighed him now and he weighs 9.1kg and looks much less chubby. That's a drop of 1.6kg which is 15% of his body weight (assuming he had followed his growth curve but he usually eats like a pig so I assume he had). Is this an issue? Apart from his cough and general grumpiness he seems perky and well etc.

TIA!

That would warrant a gp or HV appointment in my opinion.
How are you weighing him? Calibrated baby scales or by difference on adult scales (taking the difference between your weight and your weight plus baby). We had fortnightly weigh ins with our HV and I would compare the weights on my scales and it could regularly vary by half a kilo which makes a big difference at that age.
Her weight stagnated at 7 months when she started being more active but her appetite hadn't increased. Our HV said this was quite common at this age. If you have this coupled with an illness you could be seeing a loss. Any loss more than a few Oz I would be following up with the GP a 1.5kg loss is significant.

Yep, difference when weighing holding him on adult scales. But I've compared this method on these scales with the HV scales before and they've been bang on. I agree there is.margin for error though.
He did have plenty of spare tyres to burn, so is not in danger of becoming underweight or anything.
What would a GP actually do, do you think? If they're just going to say, "try to feed him more and keep an eye on his weight to check he starts regaining" then it's a waste of their time iyswim.

You don't know he's lost weight.
He's just not following his curve (due to illness).
Loosing weight is problematic. Putting on weight at a lower rate, due to a known illness is less problematic.

I just checked his red book, and he's gained 1kg in the last 3 months (since he was last weighed). He's dropped from about 85th to 70th centile over that period.

He has definitely lost weight. Trousers that were tight on him last week are now loose.

I guess I just want to know if I'm okay to watch for say a week or so? Don't want to waste gp's time.

They will probably do a few more regular weigh ins and get you to monitor his intake. With these things it's good to get some early reliable weights on baby scales. My daughter was 11 kg before adult scales came close to the baby scales. There could be 0.3kg over one weigh in and 0.3kg under the next and if only had those to go by her actual weight would be out by 0.6kg

My daughter only gained 200g between 7 and 13 months and dropped from the 50th to just under the 25th percentiles. As she never actually lost weight just didn't gain and only dropped 1 percentile so we were just in a regular monitoring regime with no pressure for increasing intake. She had a bottle aversion and intermittent breastfeeding aversion and didn't eat more than a fifth of a Weetabix and a handful of peas! Its important to get the initial weigh in early as they probably won't do much until they have a couple of weights to see what is weight is currently doing. Has it dropped with illness and slowly increasing or is it slow dropping or is it quickly dropping. Their guidance will differ depending on what situation you currently are in

It's very unlikely to be diabetes, but just bear in mind the "4 T's":

Tired - are they tireder than usual?
Thirsty - are they extra thirsty?
Thinner - are they losing weight?
Toilet - are they weeing a lot more?

These can be symptoms of type 1 diabetes, onset can sometimes seem to be triggered by a virus. The GP can check fairly easily but they don't always think of it until kids present quite poorly.

Hopefully it's just that your little one has been snotty so finding feeding harder while poorly and will just bounce back.

Thank you both. This is so helpful, and exactly the kind of advice I was looking for. I will get a phone appointment and see if they want to see him.