We appreciate Dr Rogers' comments. We agree that hunger may cause crying, and it must be excluded when dealing with infants who are crying excessively. As described in our report, colicky crying was recorded separately from other crying. The other crying included that perceived as hunger crying by the parents; ie, it responded to feeding. In our article we separately presented the amount of colicky and total crying. The diaries of 118 families showed that the infants perceived as colicky by their parents had definitely more colicky crying (hunger crying excluded) than the controls.
Feeding times were as frequent in the colicky group (mean, 46 feedings per day, 95% confidence interval [CI], 43 to 48 per day) and in the control group (mean, 47 feedings per day, 95% CI, 45 to 50 per day). For us, the definitive cause of infantile colic remains obscure.