Infantile hypertrophic pyloric stenosis: a study of feeding practices and other possible causes

Abstract

We carried out a case-control study of the hospital charts of 91 infants with infantile hypertrophic pyloric stenosis (IHPS) to determine the feeding practices at the time of discharge from the neonatal nursery. We excluded infants whose feeding might have been influenced by confounding factors. The infants were matched with controls for gestational age. The mean birth weight of the IHPS group was 3501 g and of the control group 3543 g. The male:female ratio for the IHPS group was 5.5. The odds ratio of male predominance was 4. We found that bottle-feeding was 2.9 times more prevalent among the infants with IHPS than among the control subjects. We speculate that the recently observed decrease in the incidence of IHPS is due to the decline in bottle-feeding.