Any parent of a baby with colic knows the desperation of trying to soothe a crying infant. It’s physically and emotionally draining for the parent, and the suffering for the baby can only be imagined.
The medical profession is not certain what causes colic, but the symptoms are most often described as recurrent crying for at least 3 hours per day, at least 3 days per week, in an otherwise healthy infant. Colic first appears at the age of 2-3 weeks and affects roughly 25% of all infants. [1] At present there are no truly effective drugs available and finding a good natural solution is a dream for many parents with colicky babies.

Against this background, Dr. Francesco Savino and his colleagues at the Paediatric Clinic at Turin University Hospital performed a clinical study on 83 breast-feeding infants diagnosed with colic. [2] In earlier studies, they had shown that inconsolably crying infants had an imbalance in their intestinal microflora and hypothesized that this could be the cause of colic.

The infants in the study, from 11 to 80 days old, were divided into two groups, where one was given L. reuteri Protectis and the other a drug containing simethicone, currently one of the standard treatments in Europe.

During the study, which ran for 28 days, the parents kept a daily record of the length and frequency of their child’s crying periods. At the start of the study, all the infants cried on average for 3 hours and 17 minutes per day, or 197 minutes. After 7 days, crying in the L. reuteri Protectis group had dropped significantly, from 197 to 159 minutes per day. Crying in the control group had decreased to 177 minutes, still almost 20 minutes more crying time than the L. reuteri Protectis group.

When the study ended after 28 days, crying in the L. reuteri Protectis group had fallen dramatically to only 51 minutes per day, compared to 145 minutes in the group that received standard treatment. In other words, the infants who received L. reuteri Protectis cried on average 1 hour and 34 minutes less than those in the control group. Dr. Savino’s study was presented at the European Society of Paediatric Research Meeting in Siena on August 31– September 3, 2005 and published in the journal Pediatrics in 2007.


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