OK, maybe it is just me, BUT, it seems like I find the most obscure and difficult questions and manage to stump the whole profession. So, here goes--briefly, I work as an RN,IBCLC at a free standing pediatric hospital. We are a regional center and receive complex children from an eight state region. On rare occasion we have seen infants with swallow disorders that cause them to aspirate fluids into their lungs when they take fluids by mouth. In the past, we just thickened the fluids with rice cereal and the babies did OK. Recently a baby with this problem was in our level 3 nursery. Our Swallow Team (they take the infants to radiology and thin or thicken barium to watch the swallow under fluoroscopy) dietitian began noticing difficulty getting breastmilk to stay thick. She did a small experiment with frozen human milk using both rice cereal and Thick-it (a corn based product) and found that within 5 minutes that the human milk returned to a thin state (amylase action?). She did allow the milk to thaw and warm to room temp.. The only human milk that would stay thick was milk she heated to bubbling first and then added cereal to. This swallowing problem seems to be fairly uncommon but, the medical response is to then feed the infant artificial baby milk that will stay thick :-( !! These infants are often facing many other medical problems and aspiration pneumonia is not an OK thing. Has anyone out there in Lactnet Land dealt with this issue? Did you find a substance that worked? I plan to do some investigating myself but would rather not reinvent the wheel if possible. So put on your thinking caps and see what we can come up with. I have a supply of frozen milk to use and a friend or two who can get me some of the fresh stuff. One idea was to try fruit pectin? We really do try to support our breastfeeding moms 100%, it feels awful to feed an infant the other stuff when we have the gold standard stuff available. I know us level 3 units often have greater struggle when supporting breastfeeding so any help will be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you so very much in advance, I will share any new results I get with anyone interested. Lorry Watkins,RN,IBCLC Denver, Colorado, on a bright sunny day, wishing the dirty dish fairy would attack my kitchen and clean it !!!!! ________________________________________________________________ YOU'RE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR THE INTERNET! Juno now offers FREE Internet Access! Try it today - there's no risk! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html