Nutritional Screening Assessment and Early Nutrition Intervention among Hospitalized Children

Abstract

Malnutrition represents a major problem in Egypt despite the enormous efforts to provide nutritional support for malnutrition in the last years. Malnutrition remains to be a burden in hospitalized children, it hinders clinical improvement and causes a substantial delay in both physical and mental development. In the current study malnutrition prevalence in hospitalized children was high and reached 48.2%. STRONGkids score is a simple yet sensitive way to assess malnutrition risk especially in hospitalized children. It was able to detect that 70.1% of our study group of 297 children were at the risk of moderate malnutrition, while 29.9% children were at risk of severe malnutrition. Conventional indicators like weight-for-age, weight-for-height, and height-for-age indicate different facts of nutritional status. The most common indicator is weight-for-age, whether used independently or in combination of common indices fall short of portraying the full consequence of undernutrition in the population. Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure (CIAF) is an important nutritional assessment tool which efforts to solve this dilemma. As per CIAF 54.8% were malnourished.