https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4528619/?fbclid=IwAR0ePaWUz3ZZy1iFc_vSjTOtMz6qnTkUitqh41Ik4sF4zgWQkzKtaD1gDEY

Dr. Alvarez headed out on maternity leave at the end of last week. It was a chaotic time between wrapping up the treatment plan of some of her patients, transitioning those still needing care into my schedule, planning an enhanced infection control plan, etc… However my most important parting thoughts on Friday evening were still to spend a few minutes with Kaila ensuring that we have a good plan of action to check on her before she heads into labor and talk about baby health issues post delivery.

So baby health issues were still floating in my head as I was cleaning out the bowels of my inbox and came across this article that a friend had sent me last year. I had meant to post it ever since then but it must have been buried by another couple hundred emails before I got to it.

Food allergies and intolerances are truly on the rise, not just diagnosed more often. Some are severe and lead to immediate, recognized reactions, and some are slow, chronic, rolling into each other in a way that patients cannot clearly attribute their symptoms to one food or the other (and thus testing becomes really useful). The loss of oral food tolerance is certainly driven by many, many factors in our environment, but today I want to focus on a single one that is not getting a lot of attention: early infancy prescription of antacid for reflux medications.

Reflux in babies is not uncommon and can be frustrating to deal with. It is usually a diagnosis of exclusion with babies being generally fussy, averse to laying flat on their back, coughing after laying down, and sometime regurgitating a lot after eating. Reflux in babies is really an autonomic neurological issue with poor closing of the valve between the stomach and esophagus, but the mainstay medical treatment is with antiacids. It does offer relief from symptoms of the stomach acid coming up the esophagus, but it does so at a cost.

The mechanism by which acid blocking medications increase the development of food allergies is not completely understood but the theory is that the medicines lead to poor breakdown of protein in the stomach due to lowered acid, and that those larger proteins hitting the small intestine irritate the small bowel lining and can get across the intestine to the blood stream where the baby’s immune system will recognize them as foreign proteins that need to be fought off, much like a virus.

While the acid blocking medication may sometimes need to be used as an immediate short term treatment while you look for other ways to resolve the reflux, the goal should always be to do it for the shortest period of time. Chiropractic can be of help in many babies with reflux by looking at the neurological integrity of the upper cervical spine from birth straining.