OK, so is "allergic to my milk" ever legit?

[mamacate]

This is really none of my business, but I kind of feel like I want to know what's going on. A friend of mine had a baby recently, and she was having a little trouble with latch, etc. I went over there in the middle of the night to help her the night they came home from the hospital, she had a doula, LC support, etc., but she gave him some formula. Well, he had a major reaction, and wound up being hospitalized. They gave him the super-allergenic formula, and he started to get better. Meanwhile, my friend is pumping and starting the elimination diet.

For some reason, she continued to feed the formula even on the elimination diet, even having been on it for a while, and continued to pump. They had her add back in some food, and then she started bottlefeeding him her milk "from when she had 6 foods eliminated" on Tuesday. Tonight she calls me and tells me she has officially given up on breastfeeding because "he is allergic to my milk." I said, "wow, even with all those foods eliminated?" She said, "yeah, he's allergic to the proteins in my milk, not the foods I was eating." I say, "well, it's usually cow's milk proteins, or soy proteins that babies are allergic to. I've never heard of a baby being allergic to his mom's milk." I asked if the LC (yes, she's an IBCLC) had been involved in this decision and she said yes, but I am not sure if she was just trying to placate me.

I am sure she was scared to tell me, and although it doesn't sound like it from the exchange I quoted above, I was really relatively supportive. I didn't jump for joy, but I supported her where she was with it. And I praised her for making such a valiant effort and sympathized with how hard pumping is.

But I feel like I need to know...is this possible? Can a mom have all six major allergens out of her diet: dairy, soy, eggs, wheat...gosh I can't remember the other two...and still have her child be "allergic to the proteins in her milk?"

TBH, I've been worried about this family and worried about my relationship with them for a while. They're VERY high-strung, and I suspect our parenting styles will be pretty different. So in a way I'm wondering if I should consider this a sign in that direction, but I don't want to be unsupportive of someone who did everything she could to make it work, ya know? OTOH, it worries me that this highly allergic babe is not getting breastmilk. Ack!

Thanks if you made it through this whole story.

Anyway, any experts want to let me know what they think of this? Or non-expert sympathy and advice is also welcome!

Thanks!

Cate

[tandemmama]

I'm interested to know as well. I have a friend who says she couldn't bf for the same reason. she says she tried everything (I don't know what "everything" means exactly) and that they determined that each of her children have been "allergic to her milk"

????

[Pynki]

I have a friend who was told to stop bf-ing because she had too much iron in her milk.. She has to take a lot of iron because her body doesn't absorb it properly, anyway her iron levels were off the charts in her breastmilk, and just barely above anemic in her blood.. So in this case she could breast feeed, but it was iron, and not protiens in her milk that were the problem..

Warm Squishy Feelings...

Dyan

[Elphaba]

it does happen but it's extraodinarily rare.
also, it takes almost a MONTH for the dairy to leave your system, so she didn't give the elimination diet a real chance to work.
did she want to quit and need an excuse? maybe. did she just get crappy advice and get worn down by the pressure to "just go to formula, it's easy" ? probably.

[lilyka]

I have bever heard of it. I have heard oif babies being allergic to things passing through thier mothers milk. It is also possible they they are having trouble nursing do to other things that woul make it look like themilk was the cause. There is no telling. Sounds like she was looking for a way out.

[Viola]

I've heard of galactosemia, where the child lacks the enzyme to breakdown the galactose component of lactose. I've never heard of a child being allergic to the proteins in his mother's milk while being able to tolerate cow's milk. But if he can only tolerate the hypoallergenic formula where the proteins are specially treated, then maybe he is allergic to milk protein in general. I really don't know.

I've also personally known women who had to eliminate so many foods from their diet to improve their baby's mood, that they were only eating 3 or 4 foods. A mom at LLL was just telling us this, so maybe there needed to be more eliminated than the 6 big foods, and that is just too big a step for her to go through.

[DaryLLL]

No, a baby can't be allergic to their mother's milk. That is such a sweeping statement. The LC should be ashamed of herself.

I just wonder how long she gave her elimination diet. It can take 2 weeks for the cow's milk proteins to leave the mom's system, then 2 more weeks for it to leave the baby's system. You didn't say how long she gave it, but it doesn't sound like 4 weeks!

Besides the top 6 allergens, babies can be sensitive to others. I knew a baby allergic to turkey, but not chicken, for ex.

I feel sorry for your friend if she is giving Nutramigen ABM or the like. It costs the earth and as one mom told me, it smells like Ajax!

Lactase, the enzyme needed to digest lactose, is made by the body and present in breastmilk. If you were really unlucky, your baby wouldn't be able to produce it, and your milk would be low in it too. but how rare would that be? And I must think the drug cos have synthetically produced it, so you could give it to your baby and continue to bf?

But I agree, some moms are just looking for an excuse to give up. That said, it is possible to continue a friendship with an ABM feeding friend or relative. Try and work on her other mothering skills, such as co-sleeping, if the baby needs it, slinging, reading the right parenting books, whole foods diet for the family, loving guidance later, etc. Good luck!

[Jane]

Originally posted by DaryLLL
I feel sorry for your friend if she is giving Nutramigen ABM or the like. It costs the earth and as one mom told me, it smells like Ajax!

And it will take the finish off wood furniture and tarnish metal! Ick.

Just anecdotaly, my dh was very very very allergic to milk as an infant. So allergic that when his mother stopped excl. bfing and put him on some cow's milk, he was helicoptered to the regional medical center and the doctors told her he would die because of the hemoragging in his gut. Yet her BM was ok for him. He didn't thrive on it, but was doing good enough. I suspect if she had known and cut milk out of her diet it would have been perfect.
Anyway, just blathering on to show that while the mother's diet is an important factor, there is a lot of filtering going on anyway.

In this specific case, though, I really don't think the woman wants to breastfeed. While that would be the wrong choice for me, it might be the right choice for her. I agree with DaryLLL about looking at the whole picture, re: childrearing.

[mamacate]

Thanks everyone for the info. I think I just needed to know the real story, and it's pretty much what I suspected. I was just curious if there was some condition I'd never heard of that was going on with him, in which case I would feel bad for questioning her and for all the strangers at whom I inwardly rolled my eyes when they approached me while I was NIP and said "Oh! You're nursing twins! That's so great. I couldn't nurse because my baby was allergic to my milk, blah blah blah [insert long story seeking approval from me for ABM feeding]" T does this happen to anyone else when you NIP?

Anyway, I am quite clear that this is none of my business. And I do give her credit for following the elimination diet for as long as she did, which I think was 2 or 3 weeks (but then she fed EBM that was from earlier in the diet when she reintroduced, which seems like a mistake; I had heard the same about it taking 2 weeks for milk proteins to leave the system). I know that when my babies were little, it was the best I could do to keep myself fed AT ALL, much less try to be creative and figure out how to eat without a bunch of staple foods! I suspect that if the doctors hadn't acted like the allergenic ABM (it's a different brand, but like nutramigen...neocade, I think) was the gold standard and like her breast milk was dangerous, I think it would have been different. But in the face of that, it would be really hard to persist with the diet and pumping and all. There's only so much I can do in trying to counter it too--her DH is an MD, so the medical solution is always the right one. : I wish wish wish there was something I could say now to change things, but there isn't really. She's quite wary of me because she knows how seriously I take BFing and I'm sure she'll feel criticized. This is a classic one of these situations that create that polarization. But I do feel like the system failed her DS and I wish I knew how to fix it.

As for the LC, don't get down on her. I suspect my friend was stretching the truth when she told me the LC was involved. The way the conversation went, and knowing her as I do, I can imagine she chose to answer my question very liberally. In other words, "I have talked to the LC in the last week, but she didn't say he was allergic to my milk." I didn't push the question.

So far I've already skipped the bris (I do respect, if not agree with, religious reasons for circ), and I suspect I will be having similarly tense conversations about Ferber in, oh, about 3-5 months. I have given her Sears books left and right and it's clear that they didn't read them since they were completely unprepared for BFing. She does cloth diaper...that's something we have in common still!

Anyway, another long rant. I have to say, I've been living in fear that someone in our small crunchy town would see this and tell her about this post, so I should probably just let it go here.

Thanks for listening. If only this could be easy.

Hugs,

Cate

[Viola]

Originally posted by DaryLLL
Lactase, the enzyme needed to digest lactose, is made by the body and present in breastmilk. If you were really unlucky, your baby wouldn't be able to produce it, and your milk would be low in it too. but how rare would that be? And I must think the drug cos have synthetically produced it, so you could give it to your baby and continue to bf?

I'm sure everyone knows this, but just to point this out for the sake of clarity, the lack of lactase would be lactose intolerance and not an allergy to the milk protein. I have heard some people claim that their babies were lactose intolerant, but one mom said that her baby could only tolerate breastmilk. I was curious if there was such a thing as true lactose intolerance in an infant, and I found this: http://www.gp.org.au/cls/lactose.html Wow, I learn something new every day. Cool.

Apparently there is, but it is extremely rare: Congenital Alactasia or hypolactasia This is an extremely rare condition except in Scandinavian countries. Babies with this condition do not gain weight and are dehydrated and extremely unwell.

I also wasn't aware of functional lactase deficiency which is the incomplete absorption of lactose in normal infants in response to usual feeding patterns . It is common early on and can last for 5 months, according to the info on that website.

To further clarify, galactosemia, which I mentioned, isn't a milk allergy either, but a metabolic disorder that is inherited if both parents have the same defective gene and pass it on. Apparently there are different genetic mutations that can cause it, and there is a variant of the disease that does not seem to be as serious. Like PKU, it can be detected with early screening, and if left untreated it can lead to death in infancy.

I can't actually find any information on allergy to breastmilk. Most of the sites I found deal with allergy to cow's milk protein, but I did read something that said that allergy to breastmilk is extremely rare. The AAP published something about hypoallergenic formulas and stated that milk protein allergy affects about 2 - 3% of infants, but I think this referred to cow's milk, not specifically human milk. The information on the AAP site didn't a clear cut way of telling whether the infant is allergic to the mother's milk, or something in the mother's milk. It said that if a baby starts showing signs of food allergy, the mother should eliminate foods to see if that corrects the problem.