Q: My child is 5 years old, is it normal to have a bowel movement once every 1~2 days?
A: The general concept of constipation contains the following four aspects.
①Fewer bowel movements, less than 3 times a week; the younger the child, the more frequent the bowel movements.
②Prolonged defecation time, more than 30 minutes of stool time.
③Dry stools.
④Stressful defecation and a feeling of incomplete defecation after defecation.
Q: My child is almost 2 years old, likes to drink milk, does not like to eat and loves to eat snacks, has a bowel movement once every 2-3 days, and his stool is dry and knotted like sheep stool, what should I do?
A: Drinking milk makes the stool alkaline, hard texture; snacks have too much protein and less carbohydrates, intestinal protein decomposition bacteria and fermentation bacteria number of intestinal content fermentation is reduced, also make the stool alkaline, dry and hard to aggravate constipation. Long-term dietary intake is insufficient, can lead to malnutrition, so that the abdominal muscle and intestinal muscle weak, low tension, intestinal tube pushing function is weakened, forming a vicious circle of constipation, and eventually develop into stubborn constipation.
Therefore, you should promptly change the poor dietary structure of children, three meals a day at regular intervals, eliminate snacks. You should also increase foods that contain a lot of dietary fiber: bran, vegetables, fruits, oats, gum, corn, soy, pectin, etc.
Q: What are the causes of constipation in children?
A: The causes of constipation in children are as follows.
① Improper diet or poor bowel habits or lack of good bowel training
② intestinal tract itself diseases or developmental defects: such as pelvic tumor, sacrococcygeal teratoma, anorectal malformation, anaplasia or congenital megacolon, anal trauma or infection, etc.
③ systemic diseases: hypothyroidism, systemic lupus erythematosus, etc.
④Neurological diseases: spinal cord spondylolisthesis, spinal cord injury, etc.
Q: Can constipation be caused by bowel habits and mental factors?
A: Constipation can occur in children due to irregular diet and lack of training of defecation on time, so that regular defecation and corresponding conditioned reflexes are not formed. In addition, a long period of conscious inhibition of defecation can make defecation stimulus gradually weaken or even disappear, such as children are too playful, no time to take care of defecation; poor defecation in early childhood was punished or reprimanded, school-age children afraid of late for school dare not delay to defecate, or do not dare to ask the teacher for leave to defecate during class, resulting in defecation depression or fear; often long-distance travel, defecation pattern is disrupted, etc.
Q: Can I train my child’s bowel habits?
A: Defecation in newborns and infants is mainly accomplished by the defecation reflex and the defecation actions it triggers. 1 year old and above, as children grow older, the ability to subjectively control defecation increases. Therefore, children over 3 months old can be trained to defecate at a fixed time every day, and children over 3 years old can sit on the potty for 5-15 minutes after breakfast to strengthen the conditioned signal of defecation reflex and gradually develop regular defecation.
Q: The fetal stool was not cleared until 5 days after birth, and later the stool could only be cleared with a cork.
A: Your child needs further examination to determine that congenital megacolon (the exact name of the disease is anaplasmosis) is divided into total gastrointestinal type, total colon type, subtotal colon type, long segment type, common type, short segment type, and ultra-short type according to the extent of the lesion, and some of the long segment type and common type can be operated completely transanally. This surgery is a minimally invasive and scarless surgery. According to our clinical experience of nearly ten years in performing complete transanal surgery, the surgical results are very satisfactory and the complications are extremely low.