"Doctor, save my daughter!" A couple rushed in at the hospital door, holding a young daughter in their hands.
Recently, Chenchen (pseudonym), a 7-year-old little girl in Changsha, always had abdominal pain, and her treatment in the local hospital has not improved, seeing that her daughter's abdominal pain is getting worse and worse, and her parents have rushed to take their daughter to the hospital.
The pediatrician immediately gave Chenchen a CT scan of the abdomen, which showed a thickening of the stomach wall and an effusion. The doctor immediately performed laparoscopic exploration of her and found a huge lump in her stomach, like a tumor or a foreign body. The doctor then operated on Tatsumi and eventually removed a huge stomach stone from his stomach, which was formed by a large amount of hair and food scraps entangled together.
Chenchen's mother then remembered that the child had a habit of eating hair. Doctors remind that eating hair is typical of pica, and children are a high-incidence group.
1. What is pica?
Eating hair, nails and even eating snot, presumably many children have had such behaviors, in fact, this means that it is likely that the child is suffering from pica. Pica is caused by metabolic disorders, abnormal taste, and improper diet, and patients will continue to nibble or swallow non-nutritive substances, and are more common in children between the ages of 2 and 6 years.
Clinically, it is generally believed that the lack of trace elements and psychological factors in the body is the cause of the occurrence of pica.
From the perspective of clinical studies, zinc deficiency can lead to the weakening of the taste of young children, resulting in strange taste needs, so it increases the risk of nibbling on foreign bodies. Iron deficiency affects the brain's hippocampal signaling, the formation of strange eating habits, and hunger.
Liu Junlin, director of the Gastrointestinal Surgery Department of Liuyang People's Hospital, said that if a child lacks the companionship and love of his parents when he is a child, it will lead to excessive pressure on loneliness, which will cause pica.
Pica swallows non-food substances, so the harm is obvious.
Pica is not a minor problem, and if you find that your child starts eating strange things, be careful.
Daniel Zhang, chief physician of the Department of Gastroenterology of the General Hospital of the Chengdu Military Region of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, said that the symptoms caused by the different foreign bodies swallowed are also different.
If your child likes to swallow foreign bodies such as hair, rags, or even stones, it will cause difficulty in defecation, which will further cause intestinal obstruction.
Consumption of foreign bodies can have the consequences of poisoning, such as lead poisoning caused by swallowing plaster. And the symptoms of poisoning may be acute poisoning, or it may be chronic toxin penetration.
For example, swallowing clay can cause nutrients to be difficult to absorb, further high blood potassium and chronic renal failure.
Second, how to treat pica
The treatment of pica symptoms in young children requires a physiological and psychological perspective.
1. Supplement trace elements
First of all, pay attention to supplementing your child's trace elements. Because children's growth and development are relatively fast, the demand for trace elements such as zinc is very high, and if the child's nutrition is not balanced, such as partial food, it will lead to insufficient zinc intake.
In daily life, parents should give their children more foods with higher zinc content. Pork, eggs, fish, peanuts, eggplant, sesame seeds, walnuts and other zinc content are relatively high, so that children can eat more appropriately. To develop the habit of a balanced diet for children and avoid partial eating, you can avoid the imbalance of nutritional intake to the greatest extent. If necessary, you can give your child oryzanol, which helps regulate autonomic function, which can eliminate the symptoms of pica.
2. Learn to take care of your child's emotions
In daily life, we should accompany our children more and pay attention to caring for their children's feelings. Children's psychological cognitive ability is still in the stage of growth, and parents should pay attention to the method of caring for everything.
For example, if you find that the child is biting his nails, if it is a simple reprimand or a thug, this way not only can not stop the child's habits, but also may scare the child, further causing the child to conceal his habits, and then the parents will be more difficult to find.
In this case, on the one hand, it may aggravate the symptoms of pica, and on the other hand, it will also cause harm to the child's psychology.
3. Pay attention to the way of education
Parents should learn the methods of education, skillfully remind their children, and communicate with their children in a positive way. For example, you can remind your child after he stops and tell him that it was wrong to do so. To learn to consciously guide and educate children, strengthen their cognition of the outside world, tell them what to eat and what not to eat, this process must be patient, can not be hasty. Only in this way can the child's cognition be established little by little.
In addition, parents can also establish a reward mechanism with their children, such as telling children not to bite their nails, they can reward children with toys they like and so on. In this way, a correct cognition can be effectively established, and slowly children can understand that some things are not eaten and cannot be put into the mouth.
In fact, to sum up, while paying attention to the healthy growth of children's physiology, we must learn to use the right way to accompany children, help children establish a correct understanding of the outside world, only care for them, do not let children feel lonely and afraid, that can promote the health of children's psychology.