Editor: Aigerim Akhmetova
Translator: Tursunova Balkadisha
Author: Tursunova Balkadisha
Researchers from the Children's Department of Connecticut, Hartford, USA have proposed an alternative option for feeding premature babies. Clinicians compared how nutrition affects the growth and development of a child who is either exclusively breastfed or receives additional enrichment through enteral nutrition.
Study data was taken from the Cochrane Central register of controlled trials (CENTRAL; 2019, issue 9) in the Cochrane library for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) and quasi-randomized trials. Thus, the nutrition of a group of premature newborns who were fed exclusively with breast milk and a group of children who were fed using fortified products were considered. Compared to standard breastfeeding, individualized enrichment of enteral nutrition likely increased weight gain during the study and may have increased growth in body length and head circumference during the study.
Therefore, it can be concluded that there is evidence with moderate or low confidence indicating that individualized enrichment of the enteral nutrition of newborns with very low birth weight increases the rate of growth of body weight, length and head circumference during the test compared to standard conventional nutrition. Evidence for important clinical outcomes in hospital and after discharge was sparse and had a very low degree of confidence, making it impossible to draw conclusions about safety or clinical benefit beyond short-term growth.
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33226632/
