Tongue Tie May Be Overdiagnosed in Babies

TIME

Tongue-tie—a condition in infants that can affect breastfeeding—may be overdiagnosed in the U.S. and too often treated with unnecessary surgery, a prominent doctors' group said Monday.

Transcript

00:00Tongue tie is a description of the connective tissue right underneath your tongue and that

00:07sort of anchors your tongue to the floor of your mouth and we expect that your tongue is going to

00:12be able to do lots of different things and if it is anchored in any position it gets harder to do

00:19some things very specifically in this report it gets harder to breastfeed. And so when babies

00:24are breastfeeding they need to be able to extend their tongue and elevate it in order to transfer

00:30milk into their mouth. And if there is a piece of connective tissue underneath the tongue it

00:37makes it harder sometimes to extend and elevate which makes the breastfeeding painful or sometimes

00:44less effective or both. There have been dentists that have gotten involved and will with a laser

00:52go in and get rid of that connective tissue and they feel like they have seen good results

01:00in terms of preserving breastfeeding relationships. They do it for a lot of different reasons. The

01:08practice got to be very common without a lot of good data and we got very concerned that

01:15this was being done really without a lot of input in fact in many cases without any input of the

01:20pediatrician. I think we're seeing more and more that the focus is just becoming on sort of the

01:26baby's mouth when there is just so much more that needs to be considered when we're evaluating

01:33feeding problems and breastfeeding issues. And so the people that are best qualified to do that

01:38are the pediatricians and if there is a concern and we need specialists we will

01:43create that team around the family to help them be successful with breastfeeding.

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