Milk curd obstruction in a 6-week-old infant

Olive oil enema in a pre‐term infant with milk curd syndrome

“…The nomenclature to describe the condition has varied and has included milk bolus obstruction, milk curd syndrome, milk inspissation, and inspissated milk syndrome . Milk curd syndrome was described in term babies in the earliest reports, but recently has been reported in premature infants with an incidence of 6% in extremely low‐birthweight infants, and has again attracted the attention of neonatologists. Mortality has been reported to be as high as 50% .…”

Milk bolus obstruction secondary to the early introduction of premature baby milk formula: an old syndrome re-emerging in a new population

“…Milk curd or bolus obstruction of the bowel is a well recognized clinical syndrome [2,4,7,9,10] that has until recently been only rarely recognised in the low birth weight infant. The condition had become much less common with the withdrawal of full and half cream dried cows milk preparations and condensed milks for use as infant formulae.…”

“…The cause of the obstruction was the impaction of a milk derived bolus in the lower ileum and was only seen in babies fed on reconstituted powder cows milk formulae -most frequently full cream, then in widespread use. The syndrome has been further described [2,9] and the plugs have been analysed [7] and found to be consistent with calcium soap formation. Little was added to the initial description until publcations in the American literature [5,6,8] and a single case report from the United Kingdom [3] described the development of milk bolus obstruction in low birth weight infants.…”