Constant sickness, is it still reflux?

[Spagbol05]

Hi all,
My DS is 3m (16w) old or 6w corrected as he was 10w early. Been home 10w now.

Biggest issue is what seemed to be reflux. However we are starting to worry that it's something else as he is sick pretty much constantly. He was in Gaviscon for a bit but that didn't seem to work (although dose was only 1/4 sachet at the time due to his weight. Now he is bigger (7lbs) we could try it again with a bigger dose). After Gaviscon didn't help hospital recommended omeprazole which he has been on for 3weeks now but that doesnt seem to be working either.

Not sure if I'm giving him the omeprazole correctly, I dissolve the tablet in 10ml hot water then mix half (recommended dose) with 5ml milk. But it never completely dissolves and seems to clog the teat making it hard for DS to take and there is always some left in the bottle. Anyone have a better way?

Medicine aside, the vomiting is so frequent that I can't connect it to his feeding, sometimes it can be a large vomit as much as 3hrs after a feed. Surly by this time his stomach should have digested food.
He seems to spending an entire day to push a poo out, then when it comes its loose (normal for DS). And now he seems to have started to get fussy with food, not wanting even half of what he had before and taking it piece meal instead of every 4hrs like previously.

GP just refers everything to hospital consultant by email, and consultant then takes over a week to reply. So to get a simple question answered takes so long that the problem has developed by the time we get an answer! GP seems unbothered as DS is gaining weight.

Spend every day at wits end, can't put him on back as sick everytime, and vomits can be so bad that he blocks his nose and can't breathe. So he either sleeps on us or on tummy under supervision. Husband and I sleep in 6hr shifts so one of us is always awake watching DS.

Hi @Spagbol05 my LO was born a month early and she had reflux and couldnt burp! Took us ages even up to an hour to get the burp out. She used to throw up a lot of her formula. I couldn't breast feed nothing was there so used aptamil.

I didn't want to use gaviscon as I research and lots of people said it causes constipation.

Gp was no further help.

I tried infacol, gripe water nothing worked.

Someone suggest aptimal comfort. I thought let me give it a try. All the throwing up stopped and she was burping faster.

We used this up until 4 months. Went back to normal aptamil and she threw up again but not as much. Used comfort for another two weeks. Went back to aptamil 1 and everything has been well since.

Are you breast feeding or formula?

*reaearched

Hi

My daughter was 8.5 weeks premature. Also diagnosed with reflux - while she didn't vomit a lot her reflux caused massive desaturations when she was in the NICU.

I found the dissolvable tablets really hard to give and I am convinced I wasn't actually giving her any of the active ingredient because of the way you're told to prepare it. The thing that solved it to me was getting hold of the oral suspension. You get it in a 2mg/ml strength. I've found it so much easier to give and only about 3 weeks after giving that did I find my daughters reflux symptoms improving.

It might be worth asking your GP to prescribe (the preparation is quite new so doctors may not know about it - previously you had to get a special one which was very expensive)

This is it - www.rosemontpharma.com/omeprazole

Hi

My daughter was 8.5 weeks premature. Also diagnosed with reflux - while she didn't vomit a lot her reflux caused massive desaturations when she was in the NICU.

I found the dissolvable tablets really hard to give and I am convinced I wasn't actually giving her any of the active ingredient because of the way you're told to prepare it. The thing that solved it to me was getting hold of the oral suspension. You get it in a 2mg/ml strength. I've found it so much easier to give and only about 3 weeks after giving that did I find my daughters reflux symptoms improving.

It might be worth asking your GP to prescribe (the preparation is quite new so doctors may not know about it - previously you had to get a special one which was very expensive)

This is it - www.rosemontpharma.com/omeprazole

Just wanted to update this for anyone with similar issue.

Not long after this post the hospital consultant recommended increasing Omeprazole dose and adding a higher dose of Gaviscon than previously had to match new size of DS. Before giving this a go we decided to take him off all medication for 2weeks to see what happened. And by coincidence we also stopped feeding him breastmilk. Amazingly the sickness improved.

DS was then switched to Similac High Energy formula mid August (5m/3m corrected) as he wasn't gaining enough weight on SMA gold prem 2. We then saw an additional improvement with the sickness. We still had the odd day of sickness maybe once a fortnight but generally it was gone.

My gut belief looking back was that the medication wasn't actually helping, and was possibly even making it worse. Maybe on our case DS had side effects from medication, who knows.
Then once he was switched onto Similac high energy he grew enough that his stomach muscle was able to develop to prevent the reflux completely. The odd times it returned wasn't actually reflux and was maybe a minor tummy upset.
We have since given him both SMA and some defrosted frozen breastmilk to test, and have had no issues except an increased hunger as this is no longer enough to satisfy him (now weaning).

One thing I'm very pleased about is that we didn't go down the road of giving him the mixture of drugs the hospital consultant recommended. I recall looking up the side effects of one of them and it actually listed vomiting which seems completely counter productive.

Please remember that just because this worked for DS does not mean it will for your little one. However, I hope this gives you some ideas to discuss with health visitor/GP.

Hi,

We had this with my son born 34 weeks but with severe IUGR. We thought it was reflux but eventually figured out that it was lactose intolerance. Probably caused by a combination of immature gut as a consequence of prematurity and the fact that he had antibiotics and was exposed to high dose antibiotics from my breast milk. He was miserable. Sick, constant diarrhoea, sore tummy. He eventually grew out of it around 5 but we went dairy free and he was a different baby.

Im so sorry I have arrived months late to this post. My daughter had the same problem and was suffering terribly. NHS with their gaviscon and omeprazole made everything worse!!!
The solution is to change the formula to Neocate until baby is 6 months old. All of our daughter problems went away the same day we changed the milk to Neocate. We got the prescription from a private baby nutritionist and the GP gave us the formula for free.
Now she is in normal milk. She was at 9% weight and is now at 83%.
The NHS guidlines for babies with reflux only work for 10% of the cases.

Just to clarify, our daughter was born 33+1. And had a lot of antibiotics from birth. Her reflux got so bad that she had episodios where she would black out and stop breathing for a minute. Until we changed the formula, she had never been able to sleep laying down. And was in constant pain. The gaviscon gave her constipation and made her suffer even more. Back then she was not growing or hitting any milestone. After we changed her formula she started to GROW, 1cm a day sometimes. She is now 91% in height and 83% in weight. And has catch-up in all the milestone.