Publish date: 24 July 2025
Professor Morris Gordon, Consultant Paediatrician at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals, recently published new international guidelines for the treatment of functional abdominal pain in children.
The new guidelines make 40 recommendations and is the first collaborative output on the topic to be published by two major international societies - the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology Hepatology and Nutrition (ESPGHAN) and North American Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (NASPGHAN).
Professor Gordon is well known within his field and has worked on many Cochrane, which is an organisation formed to make medical research findings and none Cochrane systematic reviews on various adult and paediatric topics and led to change in national guidance. He has also published more than 150 academic papers.
Professor Gordon co-led the new clinical guidance on abdominal pain and has previously published two other guidelines on Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) for the British Society of Gastroenterology.
Professor Gordon commented: “Getting the evidence and putting it through a rigorous process to extract, appraise and put them all together is vital to give the best evidence to the guideline committee. In this guideline we produced all the evidence synthesis ourselves from scratch to ensure the best was available and this has been effective in allowing the clearest decisions to be made to support care for children and young people with abdominal pain disorders.”
There have now been several launches of these guidelines including at a ESPGHAN / NASPGHAN conference in Finland in May.
Professor Gordon continued: “The high effectiveness and safety of treatments not using medicine, but hypnotherapy and other talking therapies is a key takeaway from this guideline and for those practicing in the UK the challenge is how to access these therapies. We are now looking to undertaken research to survey the UK health community to find out how common such services are and whether we can support improved access”
You can read the guidelines for the treatment of functional abdominal pain in children here.
