Abstract:
There is no officially accepted explanation why Pyloric Stenosis of Infancy (PS)occurs. The clinical features which consist of male predominance; onset at 4 weeks; long term cure after temporary medical treatment; spontaneous long term cure if the baby survives more than 6 weeks; first-born predominance and frequent alkalosis—have all combined to make the cause almost impossible to deduce.
This author will provide evidence that the normal negative feed-back between gastrin and gastric acidity does not exist at birth and takes a few weeks to mature.
Viewed from this perspective that cause becomes quite easy to understand.
Normal development with a temporary absent negative feed-back requires that there will be peak acidity at the time when negative feed-back matures. With normal babies this serves to protect them from enteric infections. With a baby who inherits an acid secreting potential at the top of the range, this peak acidity at maturity becomes so intense that the pyloric sphincter contracts so often and so vigorously that the sphincter becomes hypertrophic and the gastric outlet is blocked.