Recently I’ve been posting a fair bit about #colic. What’s the risk with colic? It’s just a bit of #infant crying right?

For most, that is completely true. Research does indicate that if your baby’s colic resolves prior to 3 months of age, there are no apparent long-term consequences. There is a bunch of research to back this up too; Dr Georgie Bell in a 2018 article demonstrated this by comparing two cohorts; one with resolved colic and one without colic at all (“Behavioral Outcomes of Infant Colic in Toddlerhood: A Longitudinal Study”, Bell, 2018). In this study, no difference was observed between the two groups suggesting that the colic did not have an effect on development.

However, she does make a clear point that colic can be easily confused with “excessive infant crying”. Excessive crying, defined as “daily uncontrolled crying without any obvious cause persisting for at least 2 weeks” reported at both 6- AND12-weeks of age, WAS associated with long-term cognitive development when it persisted beyond 3 months of age. (“Colic” was defined as a condition that self-resolves prior to 3 months of age, so not uncontrolled crying at 12 weeks of age).

This is important! . It suggests that excessive crying was linked with long term problems, and this was seen as lower IQ scores, poorer fine motor abilities, hyperactivity and discipline problems during childhood. Further, it gives a bit of a timeline for when we want to be addressing this infant behaviour.

So what might be causing excessive crying? Could it be the gut? Some other region of discomfort? What can you do about excessive infant crying? . Given the recent evidence demonstrating improvements in “infantile colic”, (which prior to 3 months of age looks very similar to excessive crying) it may be worthwhile discussing options with your health care professional including trials of probiotics or manual therapy.

Read more here:
– https://buff.ly/2xqZaql (Colic causes no long term issues for babies, study finds)
– https://buff.ly/2Qa2pce (Behavioral Outcomes of Infant Colic in Toddlerhood: A Longitudinal Study)
– https://buff.ly/33fFlOD (Long term cognitive development in children with prolonged crying)

#askdrchristian #colic #unsettled #crying #babies #health #heretohelp #ask #parenting #development #family #families #wellbeing