Delayed Growth
Alternate Names : Growth - Slow (Child 0-5 Years), Retarded Growth and Development, Slow Rate of Growth, Weight Gain - Slow (Child 0-5 Years)
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Delayed Growth: Common Causes
The term "failure to thrive" means only that an infant or young child is not growing and developing as expected. Failure to thrive is often divided into two main categories: psychosocial and organic.
Psychosocial causes include problems relating to poverty, educational level, malnourishment, and environmental factors (such as abuse or neglect, maternal depression, or a parent's substance abuse). Psychosocial causes for failure to thrive include the following:
- Parental inexperience or lack of appropriate education, such as
- Inadequate nourishment from a feeding schedule that is rigid or allows little sucking time -- for infants less than 1 year being breast-fed
- Too much water added to powdered formula, or water added to ready-to-feed formula -- for infants less than 1 year being bottle-fed
- Poverty and malnutrition
- Neglect or abuse
- Mental illness in a parent
- Substance abuse by a parent
Organic failure to thrive includes any disease state such as chronic illness, genetic, metabolic and hormone disorders. Organic causes for failure to thrive include the following:
- Genetic causes with no underlying disorder
- Chronic disease such as sickle cell disease, kidney failure, or chronic infection (such as tuberculosis)
- Down syndrome or other genetic disorder
- Endocrine diseases, including problems with the thyroid, pituitary (pituitary dwarfism), adrenal, pancreas, or sexual glands
- Celiac disease or lactose intolerance (digestive disorders often accompanied by loose, pale, bulky, and bad-smelling stools)
- Adverse reaction or side effect of a drug (particularly cortisone drugs)
- Fetal alcohol syndrome
- Hydrocephalus
- Gastroesophageal reflux in infants
- Biliary atresia
- Congenital heart disease such as tetralogy of Fallot
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