A Prescription for Abdominal P ain: Due Diligence Published: November 22, 2010 The stomachache people look with some envy at the headache people. Enlarge This ImageYarek Waszul Well³For some reason people respect headaches,´ said Dr. Carlo Di Lorenzo, a leading pediatric gastroenterologist and a professor of clinical pediatrics at Ohio State . ³I¶ve never seen a parent or a pediatrician tell a child complaining of a headache, µYou don¶t have a headache ² it¶s not real.¶ Bellyache is just as real as headache.´ Indeed it is. And recurrent abdominal pain in children is common, frustrating and often hard to explain. Consider a girl who came to the clinic for her 10-year physical exam. She gets these bellyaches, she told me. Had a bad one that week, but her stomach wasn¶t hurting right at the moment. She¶d been treated forconstipation; she¶d been tested forceliac disease and otherproblems. Every blood and stool test over the two years since the pain began was completely normal. One night the bellyache was so bad she went to the emergency room ² and her abdominal X-rays were normal as well. The diagnostic term for this common and perplexing condi tion is ³ functional abdominal pain´: recurrent stomachaches, as the American Academy of Pediatrics put it in 2005, with no ³anatomic, metabolic, infectious, infla mmatory or neoplastic disorde r´ to explain them.
