Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Down syndrome Medical guidelines

A comment led me to think that I should join the bloggers who have posted the link to the Medical Guidelines for people with Down syndrome.  Hopefully if you click on that it will take you to the right place.

Olivia sees a young female pediatrician who tells us that she reviews the guidelines prior to her appointments with Olivia to be certain she is keeping up on sound preventative care for Olivia.  At Olivia's 2 1/2 year old check up, her doctor said that it was time to screen for celiac disease.  The gastroenterologist said that indeed it was time to screen but that doctors have to be careful in reading the results and knowing which tests to run because there are some of the tests that would not usually come back positive in a young child with celiac but would come back positive in an adult with celiac.  The tests that always come back positive if a child has celiac came back significantly elevated for Olivia.  The tricky thing is that if these tests come back negative that doesn't tell you much, because there is a high rate of false negatives.  Olivia had positives so that made diagnosis clearly celiac disease.  If your child is symptomatic of celiac then most definitely test!

We have heard that not all doctors are very good about making certain that they follow that guidelines and that parents need to know the guidelines, give their doctor a copy and keep making sure that the doctor is following them.

No comments: