It’s challenging to diagnose and treat the most common cause of long-term abdominal pain in children and teens.
The most common cause of chronic stomach pain in children isn’t anything you can find on a test or cure with a medicine. And that can make it very challenging to diagnose — and treat.
You may not have ever heard of functional abdominal pain. Yet it ranks as the most common cause of stomach pain lasting two months or more in children and teens.
What is functional abdominal pain?
The mind and the body are tightly connected in ways that we are still working to understand, and this is particularly true of the mind and the gastrointestinal tract. Stress — particularly chronic stress, depression, and anxiety — can lead to pain that is very real. Sometimes the pain is the only symptom of stress, especially in children who are high-achieving or tend to hide their emotions.
Sometimes the pain doesn’t start from stress but from an infection or other illness, and stays once the illness is gone or adds additional pain to the illness while it is being treated. Worry about the pain and its possible cause can make things worse. The nervous system of the gut can go into overdrive.
