Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | 2 yr old son recently diagnosed with IBS

Hello,

My 2 year old son (will be 3 next week) has suffered from chronic diarrhea and abdominal pain for a year now. We have now seen our pediatrician, two pediatric GIs, a holistic chiropracter and an allergist, and our pediatrician now believes he has IBS.

I will try to keep this as short as possible. Our pediatrician did blood work and stool samples to rule out bacterial infections and parasites. Our GI has done what we believe to be a thorough work-up of blood work, stool samples, and upper and lower scopes. She has ruled out celiac, colon cancer, chron's, UC, cystic fibrosis, and did blood work to check for IgE antibodies to the ten mot common food allergies. The only things she found were a "mild" egg allergy and biopsy showed lymphocytic colitis. GI says lymphocytic colitis in a 2 year old is very unusual, and could be caused by allergic colitis, the result of a recent infection (none know to us), could be a very early sign of UC or chrons, or could be idiopathic. An allergist did skin testing of 86 foods and found no allergies, including egg. Our holistic chiro did muscle testing for food allergies/intolerance and told us to take him off of all dairy, eggs, and chicken. We have followed this advice since June 2010 with some improvement (but not relief) from his symptoms. He was waking in the middle of the night, every single night, with a bad diarrhea diaper and waking first thing in the morning with another diarrhea diaper. I had to change his clothes immediately every morning because he had diarrhea all over. Both of these issues are greatly improved. He is sleeping through the night again, but he still has anywhere from 2-6 stools/day that go from soft/loose to very watery, and he still complains his bottom hurts, usually prior to having a BM. His stools also vary greatly in color, texture, smell, and some have large amounts of undigested food, others appear more digested.

I am still not sure we have 100% ruled out food allergies or intolerances. I am reading that with a chronic reaction like diarrhea, we need blood work to test for IgA and IgG antibodies, is this true?

Is there anything else we should be considering or ruling out?

I am also concerned about the lymphcytic colitis, after reading IBS The First Year, as this is clearly a physical finding and my understanding is with IBS there are no physical abnormalities or issues, it is "just" a functional problem. Is it possible the lyphocytic colitis is unrelated, and he as both colitis and IBS? Could they be related? Can IBS w/ chronic diarrhea cause colitis? Or would this lead you to believe it is something other than IBS?

We have been following the Eating for IBS diet and adding solufiber to his diet for about 2 weeks now, and I think we are seeing some minimal improvement, but he is still generally having 2-3 stools (some just very soft/losse, some running down his legs diarrhea) per day.

In addition to the diarrhea and pain, we are also quite concerned because he had gained virtually no weight for about 9 months. In the past 2-3 months we have started seeing some minimal weight gain again, so that is definitely improvement as well, but not as much as we would like to see.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read all of this, and thanks in advance for any thoughts! We are beyond frustrated with the lack of answers and improvement. I would appreciate any input or advice so, so much.

Kristi

(edited for typos)

Edited by tripletmom (10/25/10 01:47 PM)

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