Prevalence of Undernutrition in Children Admitted  to Pediatrics Hospital at Diyala Province

Shukur Mahmood, Najdat

	Prevalence of Undernutrition in Children Admitted to Pediatrics Hospital at Diyala Province
Diyala Journal of Medicine
Article 1, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 75-82
Author
Najdat Shukur Mahmood
Abstract
Background: Nutritional support is an essential aspect of the clinical management of children admitted to hospital. The mean length of hospital stay of most children is only a few days, but can be considerably longer in some children with chronic diseases or underlying problems. During their brief stay, attention is mostly focused on the primary medical problem with a little attention given to the child’s nutritional status. Really we don’t know how much the nutritional problems are prevalent in the hospitalized children in the province & in overall country, so the purpose of this review is to describe the current prevalence of undernutrition in hospitalized children in order to bring an attention & care to that problem. Patient & method: This is a prospective study, it was done at al- Batool teaching hospital for maternity & children from 1st of September 2011 to 1st of March 2012. All the patients from >1 month to 5 yr had been included; Weight for age & sex was measured for those patients & compared to the international values published by World Health Organization (WHO). Prevalence of underweight malnutrition was calculated & showed, in addition to other characters of the sample. Results: The total number of the registered children was 410, the number of underweight children was 108 (26.3 %), so the prevalence of underweight was 26.3 %. The malnourished children were 59 (55 %) male & 49 (45 %) female, while most of them (105 (79 %)) were below 2 year of life. Those malnourished children were classified according to the type of malnutrition into: acute malnutrition (wasting) and chronic malnutrition (stunting), while according to other classification for malnutrition, the sample was divided into two groups, underweight & marasmus. while both of kwashiorkor & marasmic- kwashiorkor were not present in the study because edema was not detected clinically on data collection. Conclusion: Malnutrition among hospitalized children is worthy of attention, and effective strategies for systematic screening and treatment of malnutrition in pediatrics patients need to be developed and implemented.
Keywords
malnutrition; protein; energy malnutrition; diayla

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