on the fence

ok, so this is my first post despite the fact that i am an obsessive lurker.. i know that you gals give great advice and have lots of experience so here i am...

my 4.5 month old DD has reflux and we have been going through the process of trying to figure out what will work best to control her symptoms. we were on zantac for a few months and it recently stopped working so we switched to prevacid on tuesday. i know that it will take a week or two to really kick in but i am already seeing some improvement, not a lot, but some and at this point any improvement is excellent. i am now considering thickening her formula with rice cereal because her major issue now is screaming after she finishes eating, not really fussing when the food is going in. in fact as long as the food is going in she is awesome, it is when it is gone that the trouble starts..

i discussed this with her dr(we go to family practice, not a pedi) and she wasn't crazy about the idea, mostly because it didn't work for her own daughter, but she said that i could try it if i wanted to. she didn't really give me any guidelines about how much to add, but i know from reading that most people add 1-2 tsp cereal per ounce of formula.

so my question/concern is this--isn't that a huge amount of food to be eating 5 times a day? she currently eats 4-7 oz. bottles and 1-5 oz bottle daily. that would make it at least 33 tsp of cereal a day if i only added 1 tsp per ounce and 66 tsp if i added 2 tsp per ounce! how is that going to affect her? is it totally going to slow her intestines down? that just seems like a lot for a little baby. btw, she weighed 15lbs at her 4mo checkup so the reflux isn't affecting her weight gain, luckily..

so any advice you could give me would be greatly appreciated as my doc isn't being overly helpful. i just don't want to do anything wrong and cause more problems...

thanks!

joy

 

Have you tried the AR formula? It's already thickened. Might be a good compromise.

 

If your Dr. isnt helping you, I would request a referral to a Ped GI. They can really help you with the reflux. I will tell you what worked for us. For Tyler, we switched to Enfamil AR. That is a formula with Added Rice that will solidify in the stomach to help keep the contents in the stomach and not coming back up on you. That worked great for him and he was on the Prevacid.

For Derek is was much worse. We had to thicken his formula with rice cereal because he could not go on the Enfamil AR since he had a possible milk allergy. Our Ped recommended doing 1 tsp of rice cereal per ounce and that worked okay. We went to see a Ped GI and he said go up to 2 tsps of cereal per ounce. This dramatically reduced the amount of spit and refluxing combined with Prevacid, keeping him upright for 45 mins after each feed, and no bouncing or rocking during or after eating. Due to all of the cereal being added, that did drop the amount of formula he ate so trying to calculate amounts without even trying it really wont work.

Also I read that babies who have reflux like to eat. It seems counterintuitive but it seems to soothe them. So you may notice that once the reflux gets under control the number of ounces will drop a bit per day. Also we switched to the Dr. Brown's bottles and they really helped too.

GL with your decision! Reflux is so hard on everyone involved. :hug:

 

:welcome: Glad you are posting!

All of my kids had reflux, all had rice added to their formula, and it didn't really effect them at all, except for in a good way! I would give it a shot!

 

I added rice cereal to bm. I put 1tsp for every 4 oz. For formula, we use Enfamil AR - which has made a huge difference for us.

 

One of my girls has reflux. She's been taking Zantac, but it didn't really help that I could tell. The reflux caused her to choke when she was eating. We changed her to Enfamil AR and she hasn't choked but maybe one time since (we just changed last Friday) Before the AR, she was eating only 2 oz ever hour and half and choking at least twice during a feed. This past week she's been eating at least 4 oz, but spaces them out more, every 3 hours. It just seems its alot easier for her to eat now.

 

mine had VERY bad reflux. We tried rice cereal in the bottles and it made things worse..although they were much younger than yours at the time. We ended up on prevacid and changed their formula to nutramigen..helped a lot!! Every baby is different. I hope you find something that works for you. We eventually had to go to a GI specialist.