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Published on: May 30, 2013
Association between cholera treatment outcome and nutritional status in children aged 2-4 years in Nigeria
M V Bragança Lima1, S G Hinderaker2, O F Ogundipe1
1Operational Centre Brussels, Médecins sans Frontières, Brussels, Belgium.
Insights
Cholera impacts children
Area of Science:
- Pediatric infectious diseases
- Nutritional epidemiology
- Global health
Background:
- Cholera exacerbates malnutrition in children.
- Children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) experience more frequent and prolonged diarrhea.
- Understanding cholera's impact on malnourished children is crucial for effective treatment.
Purpose of the Study:
- To characterize cholera cases in children aged 2-4 years.
- To determine the case fatality rate (CFR) for all treated children.
- To investigate links between nutritional status, hydration, treatment, and outcomes.
Main Methods:
- Observational cohort study in a Nigerian cholera treatment center.
- Focused on children aged 2-4 years.
- Analyzed CFR and length of stay (LOS) in relation to nutritional status.
Main Results:
- Severe acute malnutrition (SAM) was present in 24% of children aged 2-4 years.
- The CFR for children aged 2-4 years was 1.4%.
- Longer hospital stays were associated with increased malnutrition severity, though no direct link to fatality was found due to sample size.
Conclusions:
- Nutritional status significantly influenced hospital length of stay for cholera patients.
- No association was found between malnutrition and cholera fatality in children aged 2-4 years in this study.
- Further research with larger sample sizes is needed to explore malnutrition-cholera fatality links.
Setting:
Cholera can aggravate or precipitate malnutrition, and children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) have a higher incidence and longer duration of diarrhoea.
Objective:
To describe 1) characteristics of and treatment outcomes in children aged 2-4 years with cholera, 2) the case fatality rate (CFR) in all children treated, and 3) the associations between nutritional status, hydration status, treatment administered and hospital outcomes.
Design:
An observational cohort study of children admitted to one cholera treatment centre in Maiduguri, Nigeria, with a focus on children aged 2-4 years. CFRs were examined by cross tabulation and mean length of stay (LOS) using analysis of variance.
Results:
SAM was identified in 24% of children aged 2-4 years. The CFR for children aged 2-4 years was 1.4%. As the sample size was small, we did not find any association between nutritional status and death due to cholera. The proportion of children discharged within 2 days was 79%, and the longest stay was 8 days. In general, health facility LOS increased with severity of malnutrition.
Conclusion:
Our study found that nutritional status affected the LOS, but was unable to find an association between malnutrition and fatality among children aged 2-4 years.
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