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

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 and in overall country. Objective: To describe the current prevalence of undernutrition in hospitalized children in order to bring an attention and care to that problem. Patient and method: This is a prospective study, it was done at al- Batool teaching hospital for maternity and 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 and sex was measured for those patients and compared to the international values published by World Health Organization (WHO). Prevalence of underweight malnutrition was calculated and 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 and 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 and marasmus. While both of kwashiorkor and 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.