Feeding disorders in infancy or early childhood are shown by the failure to eat enough food to grow normally usually one month or could be longer. feeding disorders do not have a medical or physiological condition that will be able to explain the very small amount of food they intake or lack of growth.

These disorders include a wide array of conditions ranging from problem behaviors during feeding such as poor appetite

Appetite

The appetite is the desire to eat food, felt as hunger. Appetite exists in all higher life-forms, and serves to regulate adequate energy intake to maintain metabolic needs. It is regulated by a close interplay between the digestive tract, adipose tissue and the brain. Decreased desire to eat is...

, food refusal, food selectivity, food avoidance, and pica

Pica (disorder)

Pica is characterized by an appetite for substances largely non-nutritive . For these actions to be considered pica, they must persist for more than one month at an age where eating such objects is considered developmentally inappropriate...

 to rumination and vomiting

Vomiting

Vomiting is the forceful expulsion of the contents of one's stomach through the mouth and sometimes the nose...

. Such disorder appears most often during the first year of lif e and before the age of six. Feeding disorder during infancy

Infant

A newborn or baby is the very young offspring of a human or other mammal. A newborn is an infant who is within hours, days, or up to a few weeks from birth. In medical contexts, newborn or neonate refers to an infant in the first 28 days after birth...

 or early childhood

Early childhood

For the video game rating with a similar age group see ESRBEarly childhood is a stage in human development. It generally includes toddlerhood and some time afterwards. Play age is an unspecific designation approximately within the scope of early childhood.-Education:Infants and toddlers experience...

 is the failure of an infant or child below six years of age to eat

Eating

Eating is the ingestion of food to provide for all organisms their nutritional needs, particularly for energy and growth. Animals and other heterotrophs must eat in order to survive: carnivores eat other animals, herbivores eat plants, omnivores consume a mixture of both plant and animal matter,...

 enough food

Food

Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals...

 to gain weight and grow normally over a period of one month or more. Such disorder

Disorder

Disorder may refer to :* Chaos, unpredictability and in the metaphysical sense, it is the opposite of law and order* Civil disorder, one or more forms of disturbance caused by a group of people...

s result in loss of a significant amount of weight and usually none of the prevalent medical or physiological condition

Physiological condition

Physiological condition or, more often "physiological conditions" is a term used in biology, biochemistry, and medicine. It refers to conditions of the external or internal milieu that may occur in nature for that organism or cell system, in contrast to artificial laboratory conditions...

 can explain the low food intake or lack of growth

Growth

Growth refers to an increase in some quantity over time.The quantity can be:*Physical *Abstract ....

.

Types

Feeding disorder has been divided into six further sub-types :

1. Feeding disorder of state regulation
2. Feeding disorder of reciprocity (neglect)
3. Infantile anorexia
4. Sensory food aversion
5. Feeding disorder associated with concurrent medical condition
6. Post-traumatic feeding disorder

Epidemology

Some 25% to 40% of infants and children are reported by their caregivers to have feeding problems, mainly colic

Colic

Colic is a form of pain which starts and stops abruptly. Types include:*Baby colic, a condition, usually in infants, characterized by incessant crying*Renal colic, a pain in the flank, characteristic of kidney stones...

, vomiting, slow feeding, and refusal to eat. It has been reported that up to 80% of infants with developmental handicaps also demonstrate feeding problems while 1 to 2% of infants aged less than one year show severe food refusal and poor growth. Among infants born prematurely, 40% to 70% experience some form of feeding problem.