Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Treatments and drugs
By Mayo Clinic staffEmergency medical care is required to treat intussusception to avoid severe dehydration and shock, as well as prevent infection that can occur when a portion of intestine dies due to lack of blood.
When your child arrives at the hospital, the doctors will first stabilize his or her medical condition. This includes giving your child fluids through an intravenous (IV) line and putting a tube through the child's nose and into the stomach (nasogastric tube) to allow the intestines to decompress.
Doctors can often use a barium or air enema to correct the telescoping intestine and successfully treat intussusception. If an enema works, no further treatment is necessary.
If the intestine is torn or if an enema is unsuccessful in correcting the problem, surgery is necessary. The surgeon will free the portion of the intestine that is trapped, clear the obstruction and, if necessary, remove any of the intestinal tissue that has died.
In some cases, intussusception may be temporary and improve on its own without treatment. If no underlying medical condition is found that caused the intussusception, no further treatment is necessary.
