Name: The Curious Case of Colic
Uploaded: 2020-04-07T02:36:13.000Z
Duration: 5 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Which can be really irritating, but it's normal.

It's the only way they can tell you they're hungry.

And when an otherwise healthy baby cries more than normal,

they're said to have infantile colic or be “colicky”.

it doesn't mean the doctor knows what's causing all those tears.

Though we've been studying colic for decades,

we still don't have a clear answer for why it happens.

Though more recently, research seems to suggest

a link to migraines—and that might finally help doctors

The term “colic” has been around for basically ever,

but it wasn't really codified in the medical community until the 1950s.

That's when pediatricians came up with the rule of three,

which many medical professionals still use today.

Basically, it's colic if an infant cries for at least three hours a day,

at least three days a week, for more than three weeks.

Colicky crying may also seem more intense

than regular baby crying, and like an expression of pain.

And the usual things that console upset babies,

like food or diaper changes, often have no effect.

As upsetting as colic can be, it's estimated that

between five and nineteen percent of infants

And the cause that seems most obvious is tummy distress.

After all, colicky infants often pull up their legs to their chests

which means pertaining to the large intestine.

But pinning down what “tummy distress” means medically

Colic doesn't seem to be gas-related, for example.

(a drug commonly used to treat painful gas)

have found it's no more effective than a placebo.

like that some infants struggle to digest something

in breastmilk or formula, generally haven't panned out either.

Sometimes, babies who seem colicky may actually

have a milk protein allergy or lactose intolerance.

But that's thought to explain less than 5% of colicky infants.

And outside of true milk allergies posing as colic,

Since upset tummies didn't seem to explain

all cases of colic, researchers have looked elsewhere.

Maybe it's more of a psychological thing.

Like, colicky infants are responding to high levels

of family stress, or have a developmental lag in their ability

to regulate emotion, or they're just high-strung.

But none of those ideas seem to explain the whole picture, either.

And slowly, researchers started to notice

In a 1994 paper, for example, doctors in Pittsburgh

described treating an infant with severe colic

whose daily crying episodes were really intense.

In addition to inconsolable crying, the poor thing

would scratch at her head and even vomit.

It turned out that a lot of her close relatives

had experienced migraines—those super intense headaches

that tend to be accompanied by other nasty symptoms

like visual sensory disturbances, sensitivity to light

So, the doctors tried giving the baby a low dose

of a migraine medication—and it worked.

Studies since have found that there's a strong association

more than double the risk of developing colic

And a web-based survey published in 2019 of over

1400 biological parents found the more migraines

a mother experienced per month, the higher the odds were

So it's possible that what we've been calling colic

You see, migraines are kind of enigmatic to begin with.

We don't fully understand why they happen,

or why people experience them differently.

And on top of that, we can't ask an infant if they're crying

because their head hurts a lot, or if they're being freaked out

It could even be their bellies after all.

It's estimated that between one and nine percent of children

and some adults who have migraines experience

Basically, they get all the usual joys of migraines

Why they feel their migraines in their bellies isn't clear,

but there are a lot of connections between

The two are so intertwined that there's even a term for it:

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Curious Case of Colic

intense

overwhelming

evidence

basically