Avoidant restrictive food intake disorder and pediatric feeding disorder: the pediatric gastroenterology perspective

Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) and pediatric feeding disorder (PFD) are the newest evolutions of frameworks for dysfunctional feeding and share overlapping features but maintain notable differences. This review will compare the two frameworks, highlighting some of the latest advances in diagnosis and management.

Dysfunctional feeding, particularly withing the PFD definition, benefits from multidisciplinary care with equal attention to medical, nutritional, skill-based, and behavioral domains. Management requires medical attention, often with functional gastrointestinal disease and anxiety. Pharmacologic appetite stimulation may play a role. A single empirically proved behavioral approach has not been described and multiple options exist regarding type, location, and intensity of feeding therapy.

ARFID and PFD not only share areas of overlap, but also differ, likely based on the origins of each framework. Ultimately, both frameworks describe dysfunctional feeding and require input from medical providers. The more effective approaches tend to be multidisciplinary, addressing medical, nutritional, skill-based, and/or behavioral aspects of the disorder (the PFD model). Future evolution of both ARFID and PFD frameworks is likely to generate refinement in their defining criteria, hopefully generating a structured link between the two.