Children may not be as responsive as adults to steroid medications when it comes to treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) due to associated side effects.

It was remarked by Dr. Raanan Shamir of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine and Schneider Children’s Medical Centre that a nutritional formula on the lines of diet of astronauts can help young children find remission, much on the lines of steroid-based drugs but without steroid side effects.

From Sciencedaily.com:

A similar concept works wonders for children suffering from IBD. “Prepared powder, with liquids, gives you all the nutritional requirements you need for the day,” Dr. Shamir explains. “We don’t know why these formulas work, and nobody has shown that any one formula is preferable to another. People have to be committed and eat nothing else during the period of time they are on nutrition therapy, and it is difficult to do — but if they do it, they go into remission.”

To induce remission, children need to be on nutrition therapy for 6-8 weeks. And in order to maintain remission, 25-50% of their caloric intake must be supplied by nutrition therapy, sometimes for years. This is why children experiencing the treatment need the support of physicians, dieticians, psychologists, and of course their families.

Dr. Shamir’s quest to educate the international medical community about the benefits of nutrition therapy has been an uphill battle. “The acceptance of this is difficult,” he says. “You have to persuade the family. Not all physicians know it works, and it’s much easier to give someone a prescription than try to work with the child.”

The finding was reported by Dr. Shamir in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition.