Educate me before the allergist

Nutramigen does contain milk proteins but they are broken down even further than milk based formula. Neocate does not contain any milk or soy proteins. My son did horrible on Nutramigen and ended up having blood in his stools. We asked the doctor to just humor us and let us do a Neocate trial. They wouldn’t do it but when he was seen by a G.I. the knew what was wrong and put him on Neocate. Have you tried Alimentum? I know that some babies do better on it that Nutramigen. The allergist should be able to run some test to see if their is an allergy but babies can still have intolerances. Intolerances don’t show up in test. I think in the end you might have to get some Neocate by yourself and see if it helps. Then go to your doctor and tell them what the results are.

This is what i know:

– on the difference between the Nutramigen/Alimentum and Neocate. Our body reacts to food proteins — ie it does not react to carbohydrates or sugars (remember lactose intolerant people are thosw who are lacking an enzyme and has nothing to do with a reaction of the body). Because our bodies react to proteins, a lot of babies who are intolerant to the proteins in cow´s milk let´s say will do great on Nutramigen because those proteins are broken down into really tiny proteins in the hope that those small proteins will NOT make our defensive system treat them like viruses etc and start a reaction. For a lot of people then, those formulas are hypoallergenic because most bodies will not react to the proteins.

Some children react to those TINY proteins still and therefore, you have to go to what is called an elemental formula — there are Neocate, Elecare and others for example here in Spain we have some made by Sandoz and another Spanish one. Those elemental formulas do not contain any proteins. As we said before, the defensive system reacts to proteins but will NOT react to teh smaller components of proteins, the amino-acids.

My ped explained to me why they say there is small difference between Alimentum and Neocate. It is because they are starting from regular formula. To make it easy he said, imagine that the proteins in regular milk are formed by 100 amino-acids, then the ones in hypoallergenic formulas are only formed by 2 or 3 and the elemental formulas are obviously single amino-acids… i hope this helps.

On the testing — babies that are so little have not or have developed only a FEW antibodies of their own. That means that the baby´s body may have a reaction to milk but the antibodies are not enough to show in a test. Testing is NOT ACCURATE until babies are older, maybe 2 or 3 years old for this reason. HOWEVER; there is no harm in testing… if you have a positive, then def something is going on but if you have a negative, it means nothing because the reaction does not usually show at that age.

I hope this helps.

Oh ok now this answers my question on another post! What was the reaction on nutramigen? Was anything else going on at the time? (like reflux way out of control) I would probably consider alimentum before neocate b/c alimentum’s proteins are a little bit more broken down them nutramigen according to my ped gi.