This spitting up or occasional regurgitation is common in healthy infants. In the vast majority of infants, it constitutes a harmless physiologic event. In susceptible infants, it results in gastroesophageal reflux disease. The majority of infants with occasional regurgitation are not reported to physicians.
Parents recognize that spitting up is a part of normal development.
True prevalence data are needed to establish normal ranges of frequency of a physiologic and developmental symptom. Careful quantitation of this phenomenon is an unselected population is required. Towards this goal, Nelson et al. reported on the prevalence of regurgitation during the first year of life. They recruited 948 parents of healthy infants less than 13 months of age from 19 pediatric group practices from an urban, suburban and semirural cross-section of Illinois. Infants with a history of prematurity, chronic medical or developmental problems or those with an acute illness in the preceding two weeks were excluded to avoid confounding variables.