Noticing changes in different parameters of the child's stool, parents can react to the illness in time and help the baby to cope with the malaise faster. One of the characteristics of stool that can help you notice that something is wrong with the baby is the smell of stool. What is normal and how can it change with diseases?
Why is it so important?
The smell of the feces is given by the decay products of the food that the child ate; its appearance is associated with the presence of indole, hydrogen sulfide, phenol, methane and skatole. Knowing how the baby's feces should smell normally, it will be easier for parents to determine if something unpleasant has happened with the digestive processes in the small tummy.
What should it be normal?
The first feces that babies excrete immediately after birth (meconium) are odorless. You can only find out that the baby pooped if you look into the diaper. But already from the third day of life, the baby's feces begin to change, acquiring color and smell, depending on the type of feeding.
In children who are fed with breast milk, it is normally sour. In bottle-fed babies, it is sharper. At the same time, the presence of a putrid odor in the feces of artificial children is considered the norm. In older children, it is not sharp.
Read more about normal baby stool in another article.
Alarming odors
Sour
Acquisition of a sour smell by the child's feces is characteristic of fermentative dyspepsia. It is manifested by diarrhea, rumbling in the abdomen, and bloating. Also, it is expressed in liquefied greenish feces, similar to foam, can tell parents and the doctor that the baby has problems with the absorption of milk sugar.
Fetid harsh, strong
Such a smell can be acquired by feces with problems with the pancreas (if its function is impaired due to pancreatitis) and with hypersecretion of the large intestine.
It is unpleasant in a baby who has begun to be fed complementary foods containing gluten, it can be a symptom of celiac disease. Also, fetid stools can be a manifestation of problems with the flow of bile into the intestines, caused by cholecystitis.
Putrid, unpleasant
Its presence may indicate:
- Inject.
- Putrid dyspepsia.
- Intestinal motor dysfunction.
- Impaired digestion of food in the stomach.
- Dysbacteriosis.
