Laura, thanks for posting, but really it doesn’t give you enough information to understand what kind of procedures they carried out to come to such a conclusion.

They say that they kept babies overnight and either gave “antireflux” drugs or no meds and “monitored” the reflux symptoms, of which they didn’t see a connection between the decreased symptoms and the meds at current doses. But what are antireflux meds? Is it a PPI or meds like zantac or reglan? Also, if it monitored by pH probe, then we know that these meds take up to weeks to kick in and show an improvement, so really an overnight admission with one night of meds would make no difference anyhow.

I really hate it when people publish such garbage. It just makes parents feels bad and question whether or not they are doing the right thing in medicating their child. It’s the same thing as when your mother or mother-in-law says “You call it acid reflux, but for us, that used to just be the way it was. There were no medications. Babies just spit up”. I want to smack people every time I hear that!

Anyhow thanks for sharing.

Lori:

Looks like we were responding at the same time and thinking about the same thing. Typical newspaper – just publish bits and pieces to cause a stir.

Robin

Here’s the link to the original source. Scroll down to number 9 and you’ll find the original data which was presented as a poster presentation at the North American Society of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Nutrition, and Hepatology.

Funny, because as expected, the article summarized in the NY times does not accurately depict the research findings… Gotta love the media.

http://www.jpgn.org/pt/re/jpgn/pdfhandler.00005176-200610000 -00037.pdf;jsessionid=F2bBpMyzj2CK2PNZLGp106075xz8BGGnySRnFC jyQh2r1vNLN6FJ!336912420!-949856144!8091!-1?&nav=search& amp; amp;searchid=6&index=61&results=51&count=10

Just thought I’d summarize that the researchers actually found a significant decrease in the number of GER episodes in the group who were on either PPI or H2 blockers compared to nothing. However, they found that when comparing PPI group to the H2 group, the H2 group had significantly more episodes of reflux, and the PPI group overall had fewer.

s&h’s mum2006-10-24 10:31:40

Christine, I just posted the link to the source data.

I can’t get the link to work either…

Here’s a summary that I was able to cut and paste in case you can’t view the link again. It’s also a summary, but summarized by the researchers, so you might get an idea of what they did:

kevieb wrote:

well, the cinncinati hospital has a pretty good reputation for gastro problems. the article said the children were given a variety of reflux meds—-i would take that to mean H2 blockers and PPI’s were both probably used—and probably a few other meds as well.

my understanding is that the reason the PPI’s seem to take a little while to help is that it takes a couple of weeks for them to facilitate healing so that pain is eliminated—not that it takes a few weeks for the drug itself to start working in the body or “kick in” .i think that just about everyone of us on this board has said this—-but we are really passing on info to newcomers that is not exactly correct when we use those terms. the degree of esophageal irritation among different babies would explain why some babies get relief much quicker with PPi’s than other babies do.

the article didn’t state whether or not the infants were given medication for just that nights test, or if they had already been on the meds for an appropriate amount of time, nor did it tell the dosage amounts. it also didn’t tell what they were using to guage “relief”.

was it the babie’s apparent comfort level, or was it what a ph probe actually showed? there is just too much info missing to be able to make a good assessment of the study—-i wonder if the study could be looked up anywhere else that might give more details.

i know that when sylvia had her ph probe and endo done that she did not even flinch when she refluxed—-and her esophagus was ulcerated. you wouldn’t have known how bad her reflux was if you were just watching her behavior during the day. i actually thought she had a fairly good day the day of her probe. i guess what i am trying to say is that simply observing a baby on meds isn’t exactly “scientific”—-but i don’t know if that’s what they did during the study.

thanks for the link—you must havae posted the same time as i did—now i’ll go read about the study and see how far off i am in my assumptions!!LOL!!

I have no idea how you guys do that little box thing to quote a portion of what someone said….but I wanted to say that what Christine says about it not actually taking two weeks for the meds to “kick in” makes sense. I know Prevacid worked right away for me even though I only took it ocassionally when I had reflux/heartburn during pregnancy. So, it makes sense also that some babies have more damage and that’s why it takes longer for them to get relief.

So, how do you create that little box to highlight just a portion of someone’s post? When I tried it it boxed the entire post, not what I meant to do.

ndrose2006-10-24 13:7:54