NYT - For City Kept Sleepless by Colic, No End to Cures in Melting Pot

NYT's Nina Bernstein:

...in this city where 6 of 10 babies have at least one foreign-born parent and pediatricians come from every corner of the world, a cornucopia of colic cures serves as a kind of Rorschach test of child-rearing culture in migration.

The most recent review of infantile colic I could locate, in an article in The Journal of Pediatrics by Michelle Garrison and Dimitri Christakis, concludes:

Four of the interventions studied had data of adequate quality and statistically significant numbers needed to treat (NNT): hypoallergenic diet (NNT = 6), soy formula (NNT = 2), reduced stimulation (NNT = 2), and herbal tea (NNT = 3).

Notably reduced stimulation was found in a 1991 article in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. The full text is NA online but from the review:

In 1 RCT, 93% of infants whose parents were advised to reduce stimulation improved, as opposed to 50% of those in the control group (RR 5 1.87; 95% CI 5 1.04�3.34).

There are several methodological issues that Garrison and Christakis identified:

First, the case definition of colic was highly subjective, which may have led to inclusion of infants with considerably milder symptoms ... Second, parental diaries as a means of assessing treatment benefits are inherently more subjective than the unbiased assessments by study investigators used in some trials. Third, as a behavioral trial, the study was not double-blinded.

This runs contrary to Dr. Karp's suggestion of LOUD SHUSHING to simulate blood flow in the abdominal aorta in utero. I wish someone would perform a RCT on the effectiveness of Dr. Karp's 5 S's.


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