Sometimes you have to listen to your gut.
Posts tagged children
Nutritional Space drink may help kids with Crohn’s [20Jun09]
Oct 2nd
Thinking we needMaybe going on a trip to outer space would also help kids with Crohn’s.
Amplify’d from crohnsend.ning.com
TEL AVIV, Israel, June 17 (UPI) — An Israeli researcher says a nutrient cocktail helps put 60 percent of children with Crohn’s disease into remission. Dr. Raanan Shamir of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine says this success rate is similar to that obtained using steroid-based drugs — the traditional treatment for this inflammatory bowel disease — but without the side effect of slowing growth.
Shamir realized the problem of supplying daily nutrients had been already solved for astronauts.
“Prepared powder, with liquids, gives you all the nutritional requirements you need for the day,” Shamir says in a statement. “We don’t know why these formulas work, and nobody has shown that any one formula is preferable to another. People have to be committed and eat nothing else during the period of time they are on nutrition therapy, and it is difficult to do — but if they do it, they go into remission.”
Maintaining remission may require receiving 25 percent-50 percent of caloric intake by nutrition therapy — sometimes for years, Shamir says. Children experiencing the treatment need the support of physicians, dietitians, psychologists and their families, the study says.
“The acceptance of this is difficult,” Shamir says. “You have to persuade the family. Not all physicians know it works, and it’s much easier to give someone a prescription than try to work with the child.”
The findings are reported in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition.Read more at crohnsend.ning.com
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Nutrition More Effective Than Steroids in Children With Crohn’s Disease [21May02]
Aug 22nd
This was presented in 2002 at a conference called “Digestive Disease Week” (DDW).
In 2010, 13,000 GI health professionals attended the conference in New Orleans.
Why isn’t nutrition taken more seriously by GI doctors?
Amplify’d from www.medscape.com
Alternate link: Click on the first link with the words “medscape.com” in the URL of this Google search.
Nutritional therapy achieves better long-term outcome than steroids in children with active Crohn’s disease
“In children with Crohn’s disease, clinical trials have demonstrated that polymeric or elemental diet therapy is as effective as steroids in inducing remission, whilst avoiding steroid side effects,”
Of 44 children (median age at diagnosis of Crohn’s disease, 12.8 years) elemental diet therapy induced clinical remission in 40 (90%). Median time to remission was 6 weeks (range, 2-12 weeks), and median duration of first remission was 54 weeks (range, 4-312 weeks).
Of 16 children whose relapses were treated with elemental diet therapy, 12 (75%) went into remission.
“This data suggests that there are significant long-term benefits to using elemental diet therapy as first-line therapy for Crohn’s disease,” the authors write. “Steroids may be avoided in nearly half the cases, or their use postponed by 68 weeks.”
In a second study from Naples and Rome, Italy, 37 patients, aged 7 to 16 years, with active Crohn’s disease received nutritional therapy, while 10 comparable patients received methylprednisolone, 2 mg/kg/day for 4 weeks, with subsequent tapering over at least 4 weeks.
Within 8 weeks of treatment, 32 of the 37 children assigned to nutritional therapy and 9 of the 10 given steroids went into clinical remission.
Seven patients on nutritional therapy and none on steroids showed complete mucosal healing (P<.005)
“In children with active Crohn’s disease, exclusive nutritional therapy shows a more rapid effect than steroids in inducing clinical remission and is markedly more effective than steroids in producing healing of mucosal inflammation,” write Roberto B. Canani and colleagues. “Nutritional therapy alone is the preferred form of therapy for children with active Crohn’s disease.”
DDW Annual Meeting: Abstracts 103976, 107178. May 19 and 21, 2002.
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