Educate me before the allergist

[Anonymous]

I am going to the allergist on Tuesday and I was hoping someone could explain to me how Nutramigen is different from Neocate. I’ve read that Nutramigen is still based on cow’s milk. So why is it marketed as a hypoallergenic formula? My son did horrible on Nutramigen and if the allergist tries to have us do a 2 week trial on Nutramigen then I want to be able to argue (educatedly) that if he has MSPI, he is going to react to Nutramigen (he already did). Bottom line is I need a doc to go along with us to a neocate trial. When I suggested this to the GI, he said that was reserved for a small population of severelyallergic children. He said to try Nutramigen. He said this even AFTER I told him how badly my son reacted to nutramigen. We won’t be seeing him again. So, bottom line is…i want to be able to understand and say why I want to go on neocate as opposed to nutramigen. Also, i would like to have the docs support in order to get insurance to pay for neocate. first step, i’m assuming is to do a trial. Anyway, my main question is about the diff b/t nutramigen and neocate. thanks!

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

I agree with Kathleen – it could also be useful to try Alimentum before
going to Neocate. Some babies react badly to Nutramigen but do well on
Alimentum or vice versa.

I’ll also be interested to hear what your allergist said since we are
having some issues too. Can they really allergy test on such a young
infant as Mason?

[Anonymous]

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.

[hellbennt]

I did a search for you: https://www.infantreflux.org/forum/search.asp?KW=aller&SM =1&SI=TC&FM=0&OB=2

to do a search: there’s the ‘search’ button located in the upper right hand corner of the screen

you put the key word/s you’re searching for

then you choose “Topic Subject” from the drop- down menu of “Search In”

then I like to choose “All Forums” from the drop- down menu of “Search Forum”

then I like to choose “Topic Start Date” from the drop- down menu of “Sort Results By” (this way I get all the posts from the past that might help me)

[Anonymous]

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.

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