Paediatric Gastroenterology

Acid reflux is a symptom, rather than illness, so your child’s consultant will look for the underlying cause. While reflux is not uncommon in children, further examination with blood tests, looking in your child’s throat and stomach using a gastroscopy, a barium swallow test or monitoring with a 24-hour tube test will show whether dietary changes or medication might help.

If your child is pooing less often than usual, passing hard stools, straining excessively when they do poo or experiencing stomach cramps, bloating or nausea, they may have chronic constipation. Treatments such as laxatives and bowel stimulants can help, as well as trying to find the underlying cause.

Most children have diarrhoea at some point - their diet, stomach bugs or food poisoning could all be to blame. If your child has diarrhoea for more than seven days, we’ll need to investigate, including doing blood and stool tests. Our specialists can work with you to help identify the cause of protracted or recurrent diarrhoea and create a treatment plan.

Lactose is the sugar found in dairy products such milk and cheese and intolerance to it may leave your child feeling bloated, sick or in pain after eating or drinking dairy. They may also become constipated or suffer from diarrhoea, with symptoms taking a few minutes or a few hours to flare up. Our gastroenterologists and allergy specialists can help.

It’s natural for babies to cry, but prolonged bouts accompanied by excessive wind, a red face, clenched fists and pulling their knees to their chest or arching their back may be a sign of colic. Usually, babies just grow out of colic without needing to see a doctor but if you need reassurance and specialist advice, our teams can help.

This is a problem with the way the gut works rather than how it’s structured, which is why it’s sometimes called ‘functional abdominal pain’. The pain usually relates to something your child has eaten. We have a full and comprehensive range of tests and investigations we can conduct to help identify any underlying causes.

IBS changes how the muscles and nerves in your child’s bowel work and it’s one of a range of functional gut disorders your child may develop. If they have diarrhoea, constipation, bloating or feel like they haven’t emptied their bowels fully after a poo, they may have IBS. Dietary changes as well as helping them to change how they deal with stress can often help, as can some probiotics and medicines.

Gut disorders that relate to eating, sensitivity, pain and evacuation can be caused by abnormalities in your child’s nervous system or gut muscles or by how the nervous systems in their brain and gut communicate. The result can be heartburn, swallowing difficulties, chest pain, stomach pain, abdominal pain, bloating, nausea, constipation, diarrhoea and difficultly pooing. Our neuro-gastroenterologists are here to help.

This is a digestive problem that causes the gut to become inflamed and its most common in older children aged 15 over. Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis are types of inflammatory bowel disease. If your child is losing weight or has diarrhoea or cramps, we may investigate with blood or stool tests or an endoscopy to see whether their bowel is inflamed.

Your child’s digestive system is lined with tiny hair-like projections called villi which absorb nutrients into their body. If they have coeliac disease, their immune system will react badly to the gluten in foods such as pasta and bread, damaging these villi. Coeliac disease is a lifelong digestive disorder that needs careful dietary management.