Content-Transfer-Encoding: |
7bit |
Sender: |
|
Subject: |
|
From: |
|
Date: |
Mon, 15 Mar 1999 17:35:35 -0500 |
Content-Type: |
text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" |
MIME-Version: |
1.0 |
Reply-To: |
|
Parts/Attachments: |
|
|
A few weeks ago a mother who had a bile duct stone called me because, as
usual, everyone was telling her it was a problem that she was so jaundiced,
and that her milk would pass bilirubin onto the baby. My response, as
usual, was "so"?
To elaborate a little, I told her this seemed unlikely, because if there was
significated elevated bilirubin in her milk, her milk would appear yellow.
And even if the milk did have bilirubin in it, I could not see how this
would be a problem since the baby has plenty of bilirubin in his gut anyway
from his own liver.
I suggested she get her milk tested for bilirubin, since they were going to
do her blood work anyway just before the procedure to break the stone, which
she did. I got the result today.
Her serum bilirubin was 96 micromoles/L (for the SI-ly challenged, that is
between 5 and 6 mg%). Her milk bilirubin was 5 micromoles/L (about 0.3
mg%).
One can quite reasonably argue about how accurate the test is when the test
was not made for measuring bilirubin in milk. To which I answer again "so"?
She kept breastfeeding, that was the main thing.
Jack Newman, MD, FRCPC
|
|
|