Effectiveness of treatments for infantile colic

BMJ 1998;317:1451 ( 21 November )

Letters

Effectiveness of treatments for infantile colic

Dietary interventions in breast fed and bottle fed infants should not be pooled

Findings apply only to the most severely affected infants

Trial of hypoallergenic milk is not supported by strong enough evidence

Authors' reply

Dietary interventions in breast fed and bottle fed infants should not be pooled

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ The pooled outcomes used in Lucassen et al's systematic review of treatments for infantile colic are not reported withtheir level of heterogeneity, but the three trials dealing withsoy formula milk seem to be heterogeneous as the confidence intervalsdo not overlap.¹ It may therefore be more useful to look atthe differences between the three trials rather than pool theresults. Excluding the trial of lower methodological quality doesnot seem to eliminate theheterogeneity.

The trial showing the large effect size (that by Campbell²) is reported as having no babies who were partially or totallybreast fed, while in the trial with the least effect (that byEvans et al³) all babies were breast fed. I wonder if thismight explain the difference inoutcomes.

The same reservation about pooling of the results would apply to the two trials of hypoallergenic formula milk. . . . [Full text of this article]

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Relevant Article

Effectiveness of treatments for infantile colic: systematic review: P L B J Lucassen, W J J Assendelft, J W Gubbels, J T M van Eijk, W J van Geldrop, and A Knuistingh Neven
BMJ 1998 316: 1563-1569. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]