Sometimes, it is necessary to perform medical procedures on infants or young children that require fasting beforehand, mainly for procedures under sedation or anesthesia. These procedures include performing certain diagnostic tests that require immobility or are painful, certain treatments or surgical interventions. The main reason for recommending fasting is to avoid bronchoaspiration of regurgitated gastric contents with potentially serious consequences.

Other procedures do not require fasting beforehand, even though in some interventions they are still recommended, but in fact, it has been observed that many procedures that may be uncomfortable or uncomfortable for infants are much better perceived if they are performed while the infant is breastfeeding. Therefore, it is important to distinguish those procedures and to encourage mothers to breastfeed their babies if they want to during certain procedures.

It’s important to know the indications for fasting well because it can have important side effects. Fasting should only be required when essential and for the minimum time necessary. Excessive fasting times cause great unnecessary discomfort to children and infants, as well as hypoglycemia and anxiety.

Questions may arise regarding breastmilk and whether the same criteria apply to breastfed or formula-fed infants. We aim to clarify these doubts below through the following table of recommendations that lists various pediatric and anesthesia guidelines.

Bibliographical references

https://www.bfmed.org/assets/DOCUMENTS/PROTOCOLS/25-preprocedural-fasting-protocol-spanish.pdf

https://breastfeeding.support/fasting-for-surgery/

http://www.sgineh.org/images/PDF/Articulos/AyunoUpdate.pdf