Nutritional Status of Irritable Bottle-Fed Infants

Abstract

Infant irritability, commonly referred to as colic, often causes distress to families and may have long term effects on family functioning. Most research studies have focused on the treatments of infantile colic and the infant and mother relationship but there had been no study on the nutritional status of colicy infants. The purpose of this study was to assess nutritional status of bottle-fed irritable infants. The subjects were bottle-fed infants whose mothers sought professional help at our research center because of their excessive crying and fussing. Before consultation, preliminary data were gathered which included family history, anthropometry, crying and feeding habits. The mothers were asked to keep 48 hours of crying and feeding diaries. The following results were obtained from 19 consecutive infants (10 males, age 3.6±1.8 months). Mean Z scores for weight for age, length for age and weight for length were 1.12±0.97,0.23±1.09, and 1.05±1.13, respectively. None of these infants was malnourished. On the contrary, weight for length of five infants (26%) was > 95th percentiie. The mean crying time was 134±88minutes per day which is less than Wessel's crying time criteria of infantile colic of 3 hours per day. Solid foods had already been introduced in 10 infants (53%), mostly as a measure for reducing colic. Changing infant formula was another common practice for reducing colic. Three infants (16%) had been given special infant formulas in order to avoid cow's milk protein. The mean feeding volume was 756±148ml/day (range 480-1030ml) providing 77±23kcal/kg (range 40-124kcal/kg) and 1.9g of protein/kg/day (range 0.9-3.4g/kg/day). This study suggests that some of the irritable infants may be overfed and nutrition education with emphasis on normal infant feeding is indicated for parents of irritable infants.