One-year follow-up of symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux during infancy

Objectives. 1) Determine what percentage of infants outgrow regurgitation o ver 1 year. 2) Determine whether they develop feeding or mealtime problems. 3) Determine whether they develop frequent respiratory illnesses, includin g ear, sinus, and upper respiratory infections, or wheezing episodes. Desig n. One-year follow-up survey of parents of children identified at 6 to 12 m onths of age as those who regurgitate tease subjects) and matched control s ubjects. Participants. Sixty-three case subjects and 92 control subjects attending 1 2 different turban, suburban, and rural) practices in the Pediatric Practic e Research Group in the Chicago area. Primary Outcome Measures. The Infant Gastroesophageal Reflux Questionnaire- Shortened and Revised Form and the Children's Eating Behavior Inventory (CE BI). Results. At 1-year follow-up, no parents of case or control subject describ ed spitting up as currently a problem. The parent of only one control subje ct land no case subject) reported spitting up one or more times a. day. Par ents of subjects were more likely than those of control subjects to report frequent feeding refusal: odds ratio = 4.2, adjusted by age (95% confidence interval: 1.4-12.0). Case and control subjects had comparable average tota l CEBI scores tease subjects, (x) over bar = 83 +/- 10 vs control subjects, (x) over bar = 82 +/- 11) and comparable average proportion of items ident ified as a problem (8% +/- 11% case subjects vs 6% +/- 9% control subjects) . Case subjects were more likely to respond positively to two CEBI question s indicating specific feeding problems: 1) "my child takes more than an hou r to eat his/her meals" (8% case subjects vs 0% control subjects) and 2) "I get upset when I think about our meals" (14% case subjects vs 4% control s ubjects). The frequencies of ear, sinus, and upper respiratory infections a nd of episodes of wheezing were comparable in both groups. Conclusions. 1) Infants with daily or problematic regurgitation at 6 to 12 months of age outgrew this within the following year. 2) Infants with daily or problematic regurgitation were more likely to develop feeding problems. 3) There was no increase in respiratory illnesses in infants with a histor y of regurgitation.