Infantile Thiamine Deficiency: New Insights into an Old Disease

The wide spectrum of clinical presentation in infantile thiamine deficiency is difficult to recognize, and the diagnosis is frequently missed due to the lack of widespread awareness, and non-availability of costly and technically demanding investigations.

The topic was searched by two independent researchers using online databases of Google scholar and PubMed. We considered the related studies published in the last 20 years. The terms used for the search were 'thiamine', 'thiamine deficiency', 'beri-beri', 'B-vitamins','micronutrients', 'malnutrition', 'infant mortality'. 'Wernicke's syndrome','Wernicke's encephalopathy', and 'lactic acidosis'.

In the absence of specific diagnostic tests, a low threshold for a therapeutic thiamine challenge is currently the best approach to diagnose infantile thiamine deficiency in severe acute conditions. The practical approach is to consider thiamine injection as a complementary resuscitation tool in infants with severe acute conditions; more so in presence of underlying risk factors, clinically evident malnutrition or where a dextrose-based fluid is used for resuscitation. Further, as persistent subclinical thiamine deficiency during infancy can have long-term neuro-developmental effects, reasonable strategy is to treat pregnant women suspected of having the deficiency, and to supplement thiamine in both mother and the baby during breastfeeding.

Health care professionals in the country need to be sensitized to adopt a high level of clinical suspicion for thiamine deficiency and a low threshold for the administration of thiamine, particularly when infantile thiamine deficiency is suspected.