If you suspect your child has appendicitis, try the ‘jump test’

When your child is in pain, the stress might be too much to stomach.

It might be that they ate something that doesn’t agree with them — or it could be something more serious like appendicitis.

Since kids can’t always communicate exactly how they are feeling, something called the jump test might help determine whether they need to go to the ER, mom Selena Simmons-Duffin wrote for NPR.

Duffin detailed how she was worried her 5-year-old had appendicitis, a condition in which the appendix becomes inflamed, and sometimes requires surgery, according to the Mayo Clinic.

The appendix is a pouch that sticks out from the colon and can become inflamed and filled with pus due to a virus, infection or parasite. When ruptured, if not treated, it can be life-threatening.

She called her pediatrician who gave her the following advice: “If you want to check for appendicitis, you can do the jump test.”

“The what?” Duffin replied. 

“Just get her to jump and see if she doubles up in pain,” she said.

“If not, you don’t need to worry so much — it’s probably just something she ate or constipation,” her child’s doctor informed her.

Duffin got her child to jump, and it didn’t cause her much pain, which likely meant she didn’t have appendicitis. 

Duffin spoke to another pediatrician, Jennifer Shu in Atlanta, Georgia, who said she also recommends the jump test — though it’s not always accurate.

“There are studies on the jump test,” she said.  “They look at what are the chances if you have a positive jump sign that you also have appendicitis, and it’s around 70% — so it’s high, but it’s not a perfect test.”

She explained that the jump test works because when someone has appendicitis, the lining of the abdominal cavity, called the peritonitis, is also inflamed. One of the symptoms of peritonitis is the inability to walk or jump. 

But since the test only works 70% of the time — it isn’t perfect. 

She told Duffin about a few more tests people could try at home. 

“If you’re lying down and you press on the left-lower quadrant, is there pain in the right-lower quadrant?” she said, explaining another symptom of appendicitis.

“If you press down over the appendix on the right lower quadrant, is there more pain when you let up? That’s called rebound,” she explained. 

Around 7% of Americans will get appendicitis in their lifetime, according to healthychildren.org.

“The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert, 59, recently suffered from a ruptured appendix over Thanksgiving, calling it “abdominal agony.”

“I decided to do the show that night. How bad could it be? Turns out extremely bad,” Colbert said Monday when returning to the show. “The pain was off the charts by the time I made it to stage that night.”

He said he had “figured the pain would go away” but knew something was wrong when he had a “raging fever.”

Along with pain, other symptoms of appendicitis include nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, low-grade fever, constipation, diarrhea, abdominal bloating and gas.

Doctors miss appendicitis in 3.8% to 15% of children and in 5.9% to 23.5% of adults during an ER visit, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open.

It’s sometimes misdiagnosed as constipation and could require a follow-up visit which eventually leads to a diagnosis.

“The repeat health care visit could be either again at the emergency department or another health care facility, and the majority of these diagnoses were made within seven days of the initial emergency department visit,” the study’s lead investigator, Prashant Mahajan, a professor and vice-chair of emergency medicine at Michigan Medicine and division chief of pediatric emergency medicine at CS Mott Children’s Hospital, found.