When do baby's gas pains usually go away?
My daughter is suffering from gas pains. We have taken steps to reduce them, which were moderately successfull. Still, I'd like to know when will baby's gas pains go away?
When will the baby stop feeling pain during bowel movements and passing gas? What are your experiences? When did your children stop fussing/crying because of that?
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Use probiotics, specifically Lactobacillus reuteri (L. reuteri), and expect improvement after 7 days.
In the past decades, there was a steady growth of evidence that probiotics have many benefits and few side effects for both adults and babies.
There are several studies on specific strains (see below), but there is no consensus as to the best strains. So my layman's choice was to select an inexpensive powdered mix of multiple bacterial strains, covering a few of Lactobacillus (such as L. reuteri) and Bifidobacterium strains.
We used Udo's choice infant probiotic (a mix of multiple bacterial strains, as powder), daily for the first year or so, starting with birth, as a prophylactic for colics and diarrhea. As with all bacterial probiotics, I bought them only in the refrigerated section of the stores (Whole Foods, or specialty health food stores), and stored them in the fridge.
Not sure if this had any effect, or we were just lucky, but the kids did not experience any colics, and when they did have diarrhea, it was short-term.
Clinical Guide to Probiotic Products Available in USA: usprobioticguide.com/
Using probiotics in the paediatric population | Position statements and practice points | Canadian Paediatric Society: www.cps.ca/documents/position/probiotics-in-the-paediatric-population
If you need more, search Google using the terms: pubmed probiotics infants gas, or something similar. You can find plenty of research results on the topic, most of which support the recommendation of probiotics for gas pain or colics, for example:
Koonce, T., Mounsey, A., & Rowland, K. (2011). Colicky baby? Here's a surprising remedy. The Journal of family practice, 60(1), 34–36: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3183958/
This articles cited the dose of L. reuteri, 100 million colony-forming units (abbreviated CFU) daily, with improvements above placebo seen after only 7 days.
I'm currently having this problem with my 10 week old. The doctor recommended 2 ounces of chamomile tea per day, but we have not tried it yet. It's hard to say that anything will help, but sometimes I just bundle him up in a good, warm swaddle, hold him nice n tightly against me and give him a pacifier. When the gas acts up, I give him swift pats on the bottom and I rub his lower back and tummy. Sometimes those things seem to help, and sometimes they don't.
Chamomile tea works on my little one, she is now 12 weeks and we definitely had our share of tummy troubles and still do, just not as often. I hope once she hits the 3 months it starts to go away, I also tried gripe water, warm baths and applying a heated (warm of course) towel that I would iron and press gently on her tummy.
My little girl had some hard times from 0 to 3 months. After 3 months and few days, it disappeared.
There weren't much we could do to really stop it. We did some things to help, but somedays she would cry for one whole hour. The things that worked best were:
a warmed-up towel, etc, over her stomach
doing some massage by stretching her legs, then pulling it back over her stomach (slowly, of course)
giving her a little bit more breastmilk (more times each day, smaller quantities each time)
giving her a warm hug and walking, slowly, across the house, while speaking very low and very near her head, with a more grave voice
give her some Simethicone - Mylicon or similar - drops, after authorized by our doctor.
And, specially, keeping calm. Hear her crying kind of urged us to do something, but as time passed by we learnt that it was something natural to her, so all we could do was comfort her. And wait for the magical 3 months, more or less.
We found goat's milk formula (as opposed to generic formula which is derived from cows milk) helped with our newborn. He still gets a some gas every now and then but its a lot better since we made the transition. Goat's milk I believe is more like human milk than cow's or soy milk.
Again, could have just been chance effect and he would have got better with age. He is now half way through 5 weeks. His worse weeks by far were week 2 and 3 when he was on generic formula.
Down side to goats milk formula is he stinks of goat's curd. Can over drink it because he loves it. And its more expensive.
Still don't understand why, say once a week he still gets wind pain. Better than every day though. In anycase with infants remember - what works for me may not work for you. Also, we didn't really see improvements for a couple of days after going to goat's milk formula.
The product we used was - www.productreview.com.au/p/karicare-plus-goat-one-infant-formula.html
My two both had intermittent gas pains for the first three months or so, but worst was the first 6 weeks - from 6 to 12 weeks it wasn't nearly as bad, and after 16 it was fairly rare as we started solids around that time (had a brief bad period right after the first solids, and then no real problems after that).
It definitely depends on breastfed versus formula babies; the former have more constipation, the latter have more trouble with air-induced gas from bottles, from what I've seen from other parents.
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