RESEARCH ARTICLE
Constipation is the Most Frequent Cause of Chronic Abdominal Pain in Children
Vera Loening-Baucke1, *, Alexander Swidsinski2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 2
First Page: 16
Last Page: 20
Publisher Id: TOPEDJ-2-16
DOI: 10.2174/1874309900802010016
Article History:
Received Date: 24 /01 /2008Revision Received Date: 05 /03 /2008
Acceptance Date: 11 /03 /2008
Electronic publication date: 27/3/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The aims of the study were to identify the frequency and causes of chronic abdominal pain in a large academic primary care population at the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital. We evaluated retrospectively the complete charts of children ≥4 years old, seen for at least one health maintenance visit in the primary paediatric clinic during a 6-month period, for complaints and causes of chronic abdominal pain. Of 493 boys and 469 girls with a mean age of 9.1 years, 12.7% had been evaluated for chronic abdominal pain. Constipation as cause of abdominal pain occurred in 83%, childhood functional abdominal pain in 8%, colic in 5%, gastroesophageal reflux in 2% and infection in 2%. The life-time prevalence rate for chronic abdominal pain was 13.3%; was due to functional causes in 13.1% and due to organic diseases in 0.2%. Functional constipation was the most frequent cause of chronic abdominal pain in a large primary care paediatric population.
