Guest blog post from Dr Francesco Savino of the University of Turin.
We are pleased to announce that PeerJ will be publishing the proceedings of the upcoming Symposium on “Advances on Infantile Colic”, being organized by PeerJ Editor, Dr Savino in Turin on Oct 4th – 5th 2013. By using the PeerJ Collection ability, the publications from the Symposium will be presented on a single site, and made freely available for anyone to read and download. More information about PeerJ Collections can be found here.
The program for the Symposium can be downloaded here, and an open letter from Dr Savino is here. As articles are submitted and accepted, the Collection will build up and will be findable via https://peerj.com/collections/. In his guest blog post, Dr Savino explains the motivation for the symposium:
“Infant colic is a very common disorder of the first three months of life in healthy infants and the worldwide incidence is 20-30% of all pediatric visits. The most common symptom of infantile colic is fussing and inconsolable crying associated with aerophagia and leg contractions occurring in the late afternoon and evening due to abdominal pain in otherwise healthy infants younger than 3 months of age. Pediatricians differentiate this condition from other diseases (gastroesophageal reflux, otitis, urinary tract infections, constipation, bowel intussuception) by performing a clinical evaluation.
The available evidence suggests that infantile colic might have several independent causes such as: feeding disorders, dismotility, lactose intolerance, cow’s milk protein allergy and food hypersensitivity , psychological factors (infant-parent interaction), and more recently gut hormones (motilin, ghrelin) and gut microflora (increased Coliform and E. Coli, and lower Lactobacillus spp). There is no consensus on the therapeutic approach of infantile colic, but these new findings open new perspectives in the management of this disorder.
The aim of the Symposium: “Advances on Infantile colic”, is to provide a critical revision of some still unresolved problems related to infantile colic. International and national experts will participate in the meeting and will discuss the identification of new approaches for the treatments and prevention of negative outcomes.
Registration is still open, and we invite all interested parties to attend.
Francesco Savino,MD PhD
President of the Meeting”