Medicine: Children with Ulcers

Because children with peptic ulcers seldom appear in medical literature, it has been assumed that the disease is rare. Far from it, says Dr. Bertram R. Girdany: at Pittsburgh’s Children’s Hospital he has had no less than 45 cases in a year.

Dr. Girdany’s child patients ranged from 14 months to eleven years old. Some had ulcers of the stomach, some of the duodenum. There were 25 girls and 20 boys, and nearly all told the familiar story of feeling intense pain when hungry, often in the middle of the night, and of getting relief after a meal. A few had had recurrent vomiting spells instead of pain —possibly a sign of ulcers that are otherwise overlooked.

The child with ulcers is much like an adult with ulcers: the brighter-than-average, tense type, who bottles up his emotions. (Dr. Girdany’s patients did not kick and scream the way many kids would if offered a “barium breakfast,” but suffered in silence.) Such children may carry their ulcer troubles into adult life —so that tense little tykes grow into big, tense tycoons.