Well I think it's time to give you a little update.

When I got salad's very insightful information about 160b I immediately cut it out of DD's diet. Monday was the last day she had anything with 160b in it, so it's now the 5th day off the additive.

So what have I noticed during this time....
within 36-48 hours I noticed a significant decrease in the head hitting / head banging.
Thursday morning was the last reported head hitting incident which was relatively mild and short lived. To be honest it was almost as though she started doing it out of habit then realised how silly and unneccessary it was so she stopped! Previously she had been totally unable to stop herself - the more she hit herself the harder it was for her to stop so she would just do it over and over and over again
The last 2 days have seen not even a hint of head hitting!!!

It is still early days but I am very confident that annatto or 160b has been the cultrip for this very distressing behaviour in my DD. This has been a challenging week for DD (return to day care/change of routine), interrupted sleep etc. At times she has been very upset and frustrated and yet she has managed to control her behaviour and not resorted to banging her head. Go back a few weeks and this situation would result in frequent outbursts of head banging.

I am still amazed that such a tiny thing can have such a big impact. But after reading the research and discovering that 160b frequently causes head banging, then removing it from DD diet and seeing her head banging stop, I have proven to myself that the additive is very harmful and not something I will ever give to DD again.

I hope those of you reading look into this and consider removing the additive from the diets of your little ones.

Fi