Help to spot noticeable stool colors in babies

Dear parents,

In December 2016 we started to send so-called chair color cards to all maternity clinics in Lower Saxony, which in the best case should be integrated into the yellow booklet and should help parents, midwives and paediatricians to identify children with discolored stools (also as acholic Chairs) at an early stage and, if necessary at all, to carry out further diagnostics and therapy. In the age of modern media, we want to go one step further and offer you the option of a virtual chair card. This will not tell you whether a finding is conspicuous or not - however, it should help you to recognize conspicuous chair colors.

"Discolored stools" are not synonymous with a life-threatening illness and only in rare cases does this mean that further clarification is required - however, it must be prevented that all of these cases are dismissed with "breast milk jaundice".

If the chair colors 5 - 7 appear on the chair card, a pediatrician should be consulted at an early stage, who should then assess whether a diagnosis in the hospital (in specialized centers for pediatric gastroenterology) is necessary. It may also be that it is initially decided to carry out regular laboratory tests, especially of the bilirubin - even if this is of course done with a (especially for parents) painful blood collection, the results can be of great importance for further care and must in this context unfortunately are accepted in order to guarantee the further healthy development of the child.

It must be expressly pointed out here that you should not wait until U3 to see a pediatrician, as the time window between the 3rd to 8th week of life (for U3) is too wide. In the case of diseases such as biliary atresia, however, the time of diagnosis and therapy is immensely important for the further course!