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Question

Thank you for your quick answer. We received a call today. Our daughter has a protein and fat intake disorder and we have to take another sweat test tomorrow. She is taking pancreatin now. Our pediatrician thinks it could be a sub-group. Does something like that exist?

Answer

Hello,

your child has probably been diagnosed with a pancreatic insufficiency (e.g. through determining the Elastase I in the stool). This is probably also the reason why she is getting pancreatin already. A insufficiency of the pancreas occurs in approx. 80% of CF patients. Therefore, in order to clarify whether the patient has CF, one will always carry out a sweat test if such a hypofunction is diagnosed. However, there are other clinical patterns featuring a pancreatic hypofunction (e.g. Shwachman-Diamond Syndrome; condition after pancreatitis, e.g. after viral infection; etc.). Since CF is the most common cause of pancreatic hypofunction, the existence of this disease has to be clarified in the first place, of course. The clinical pattern of CF offers many different pictures and courses of the disease. Should this disease be confirmed with the presence of a pancreatic hypofunction, one can assume to be dealing with a classic case of CF.

Kind regards,

Dr. H.-G. Posselt

08.01.2009