Is there any scientific evidence for either of these opposing views? The main piece of evidence for the ‘tense-mother/crying-baby’ idea is that first babies tend to cry more than subsequent ones – doctors infer from this that the mother’s inexperience is an important factor. However, there is no data to show that first babies really do cry more – it is just a subjective impression. One study that investigated this idea found that there was little difference between first babies and later ones. Even if a first baby does cry more, the link with maternal anxiety is still only a speculative one, and there are other, far more plausible explanations.
The evidence for the second point of view is limited, but certainly stronger than that for the first. A Swedish study of 19 bottle-fed babies with colic found that over 70 per cent improved when changed to formula feeds that did not contain whole cow’s-milk protein. The same research team found that cow’s milk in the mother’s diet could cause colic in breast-fed babies.
Another trial carried out in New Zealand, and widely quoted in the medical literature, apparently failed to find any link between the mother’s diet and colic in breast-fed babies. In fact there were several serious flaws in this trial, and its findings have been widely misrepresented anyway. Twenty mothers were involved, and the main focus of the trial was the role of cow’s milk in causing colic. The mothers were asked to avoid cow’s milk, and were then challenged with it in a disguised form, so that they would not know when they were drinking milk and when they were drinking the ‘control’ substance. Soya milk was used for this ‘control’ without any investigation of whether the babies might be sensitive to soya proteins. The mothers were given milk-with-soya to drink for two days or soya only for two days – there was an interval of two, four or six days between the milk challenges. Experience suggests that this may not be long enough to detect changes in the baby’s symptoms -although some babies recover within 24 hours of the mother eliminating offending foods from her diet, others can take many days, sometimes as much as two weeks, for their colic to settle down. The whole trial only continued for 12 days.
*264\180\8*
Related Posts:
Tags: Allergies
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.