Failure to thrive and developmental delay

[klink]

Hi!

Jace is 2 months old and has always been struggling with gaining weight. At 3 weeks old we found out he has a lip and tongue tie and I was really hoping that would resolve his weight gain and puking issues, but it didn't. I weaned and put him on formula which worked for a while, until he got blood in his stool so he got diagnosed with a milk protein allergy. Soy formula made him constipated, so now he is on Similac alimentum.
He's been seen by a GI doctor who prescribed Nexium for reflux and we have to mix his formula so he has more calories. He is gaining weight now with the higher calorie formula, but now his development is delayed. He rarely smiles back at us, doesn't coo or make any ah sounds and is in general not very interested in us.
We have an appointment with a development pediatrician on the 3rd but I was wondering if someone else has a baby that is FTT and had developmental delays because of that?

 

[AnonymousCAT]

I think 2 months is still early to be too concerned about developmental delay. I would give him more time. My DS didn't really coo until he was older. And you said he does smile at you, just not often. So it sounds like he is still developing. Things for us really started to progress more after 3 months. That being said all babies develop at their own pace. Try to be patient and see how he gets on.

 

[klink]

His doctor is concerned too though as he is failure to thrive. she said if he was growing normally she wouldn't worry too much but since he has those issues she wants to get it evaluated.

 

[superfrizbee]

He has had a lot of feeding issues. Hopefully they're resolved now and he should start gaining better. If so then he isn't necessarily ftt, he's just had a difficult start and slower weight gain to begin with. I think your doc is being cautious which is fine, but try not to read too much into milestones just yet as he is very young.

 

[AnonymousCAT]

I have met many babies that have had difficulty gaining weight or are low percentile that do not have developmental delay. One does not indicate the other. Hopefully being evaluated will give you peace of mind that everything is fine.

 

[erinprime]

My child has always struggled with eating and weight gain. She is currently FTT at 17 months old. Her weight is below 1% and she continues to fall off the curve with every weight check. She does not have nor has ever had any developmental delays though. She crawled at 6 months, cruised at 7 months, and walked at 11 months. She has always been ahead of average for speech, though she was not a babbler and made few sounds before actual words. Now she has hundreds of words, speaks mostly in phrases and sometimes in full sentences. She is quite bright and already knows the entire alphabet, uppercase and lowercase, and the phonetic sounds for each letter. She also knows all of the basic shapes, colors, and can count objects in small numbers. I don't know how her brain finds the calories to keep up but she continues to surprise me.

I think 2 months is just too early to be concerned but I know it is hard not to worry. My daughter has a very serious personality and just does not smile or laugh often, even when she is at her happiest. Every baby really is so different. I just wanted to let you know that is possible to have continued feeding problems (I thought we'd be through it by 17 months but nope!) and have your child develop perfectly typical in every other way. Good luck!

 

[klink]

Thanks everyone! I just feel so defeated! I am in two groups and everyone's baby in both groups is growing and gaining normally and doing all those things that my baby doesn't do yet and they are complaining how they want their babies to stop growing. And I know I'm crazy for this, but it makes me so mad for them to say "stop growing" when my baby has issues doing just that!

 

[MindUtopia]

My advice would be to just keep doing everything you're doing and give it time. My daughter had a lot of trouble with weight gain in the first 2 months. I'm not sure she would have technically been diagnosed as FTT, because often that's if they don't regain their birth weight within 28 days. She regained her birth weight in 26 days, so technically we missed that cut off, but she was 25th centile at birth and dropped to 2nd centile. By 3 months, which was shortly after we switched to formula (no dairy issues, so for us, that made a real difference), she had caught up again to where she should have been, but those first few months were pretty rocky. I've always felt like maybe she was maybe a month or so behind friends babies in when she hit certain milestones, but I always chalked that up to the fact that she was 3 weeks early, while many of them were born at 41-42 weeks, so they'd just had so much more time "cooking" and were technically older, even though my daughter was born first, if that makes sense. But I would never say she had any sort of developmental delay and she has more than caught up with herself now. She's 27 months, and though she's still small (9th centile for height), we just had her 2 year development check and she is well ahead of your average 2 year old developmentally. She can hold a pencil like a 4 year old should. She speaks in full complete, complex sentences. She's very outgoing and empathetic and social. Those tough couple of months haven't affected her at all. Now every baby is different and you may find you have a bit longer struggle to sort things out because of the CMPI, but I would try not to compare your LO to other babies. It's quite likely they may be doing things your LO isn't doing, and that may have nothing to do with FTT (some babies just do things earlier or later), and it's also possible that it may, but once you get the feeding issues sorted and your LO starts to put on more weight, he'll leap ahead really quickly. It could also totally just be perception too. I know when I was really worried about weight gain, I probably didn't even notice all the things my daughter was doing, because I was stressing about how much she'd eaten that day. Then one day at 3 months, she was smiling and making all sorts of noises and then she rolled over (well ahead of any of our friends' babies who I thought were so developmentally ahead of her). So just hang in there now, keep working on the feeding, and try not to let it worry you for now.

 

[snickersbar]

My lo didn't have ftt but has had various issues with digestion, diet and possible allergies that have made her so miserable. She's now on a restricted diet which has helped but before that she wasn't interested in things and rarely smiled or laughed.

So although i agree that 2 months is too young to worry about development and i can't help with the ftt, it's a possibility that if your lo is feeling under the weather with an allergy it's causing them to not be as interested as they may be otherwise.

 

[klink]

So literally one or two days after I posted this, he started smerking and smiling at us and is even playing with one of his toys.