Acid reflux

Re: Acid reflux

• drabong88 member

  December 2016

  @jennlynn777 was having issues with her LO, she has a thread where she talked about the issues just a few spots down. 

  

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• jennlynn777 member

  December 2016 edited December 2016

  My son experienced some pretty severe reflux. He was born with symptoms. He had trouble swallowing at first and cried a lot. Apart from that those were his initial symptoms. I tried an elimination diet because I was breastfeeding but that didn't work. So we switched him to formula. We went right to Alimentum which is the equivalent to Nutrugimen. We saw a tiny improvement in how often he cried but not much. It appeared he had silent reflux which was burning his throat. He also began regurgitating up into his nose at every feeding. We at to put him on a premie nipple from Dr. Browns just so we could slow the flow for him to swallow better. He also had this mucousy sound in his throat and had an abnormal amount of squeaking when he fed. 
  His pediatrician prescribed him some Zantac that helped for about a day but did nothing after that. He ordered a swallow study and found his esophagus  to be normal but diagnosed him with GERD. After that I was able to convince the Ped. to send him to a GI specialist. The GI took note of all his symptoms and suggest a possible milk allergy. He prescribed him Nexium because Prevacid wasn't covered by insurance. I think that was a good thing because its been reported by many users that Nexium works far better than Prevacid and they don't grow a tolerance to it. You do have to keep the drug to body weight ratio correct but other than that it is pretty fantastic stuff. He also took him off of Alimentum because even though the proteins are broken down it still wasn't enough. He was put on a 100% milk free formula called Elecare. It is amino acid based. After about a week on meds and formula change we started to notice some improvement. By the end of the month his symptoms were almost gone. 
  We went back to see the GI Dr. for an update and he said that between 2 and 4 months is when we would seethe worst reflux and since he was already improving to almost no symptoms we could wean him off the meds by 4 months. This month at 2 months we started to wean him off the meds. It is day 5 without meds and he hasn't had any episodes of reflux.
  Things that helped me:
  1. ALWAYS feed your baby sitting up. 
  2.Use the slowest flow nipple you can find. Dr Brown is the only one I have found that has Premie. This will ensure your baby digest the food slower and eliminate gas bubbles. Filling up quickly and gas will aggravate the reflux. 
  3. Make sure your baby sleeps at an incline. My son sleeps in his swing on the lowest incline. It is the perfect incline. Even his bouncy seat was just a tad to high. 
  4. Only burp on the shoulder. Any other position puts to much pressure on the stomach. 
  5. Never lay baby down on back after a feeding. The only time my baby gets play time on the back is when he wakes before a feeding. Tummy time is out the  question for us. It's to much pressure on the tummy. We always do diapers changes before he eats.
  6. Switch to Elecare or Neocate Formula if there is no abnormality in the esophagus. That would eliminate the issue of a severe milk allergy. 
  7. Try Nexium. Zantac is not a PPI drug so it didn't help us much and they grow a tolerance over time.
  8. See a GI specialist so they can eliminate issues and find the root cause. 
  Remember that formula changes don't produce symptoms overnight. There are lots of babies that it takes up to 3 months to completely eliminate any traces of milk from their system. Our son took a few weeks for elimination. Also, meds might take a bit to take full affect too so just be patient. :-) 
  

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• Moemeek member

  December 2016

  Wow, this is identical to our experience. I'm so happy ur LO is feeling better. I know firsthand what it's like. I give my LO a probiotic every morning and add rice cereal to her bottle to thicken the feed a lil bit and my LO is on Prevacid. Everything else is and has been the same for us. My LO also broke out Ian eczema. The elevate has been a true savior.
  good luck ladies

  

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• Moemeek member

  December 2016

  Elecare

  

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• jeliz0329 member

  February 2017

  This is how our daughter was they also put her on Zantac which still works for her but the put us on nutramigen and it was awful...we switched to gentlease and never looked back! Good luck!

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