Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure Burden among Hospitalized Pediatric patients

Abstract

Summary Malnutrition continues to pose a significant problem in Egypt despite the immense efforts to provide nutritional support for malnutrition in the last years. Moreover, among hospitalised children malnutrition represents a great impediment to clinical improvement and causes a significant delay in physical and mental development. The prevalence of malnutrition is as high as 12-24% among hospitalised children (Shaughnessy and Kirkland, 2016). Conventional indicators like weight-for-age, height-for-age, and weight-for-height indicate different facts of nutritional status. The most common indicator is weight-for-age, whether used independently or in combination conventional indices fall short of portraying the full consequence of undernutrition in the population. Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure (CIAF) is another nutritional assessment tool which efforts to solve this dilemma.