Enteral nutrition practices in preterm infants in the neonatal unit of a public maternity ward

DOI: 10.15343/0104-7809.20184203696709

Abstract

The aim of the study was to evaluate the practices of enteral nutrition therapy in preterm infants. This is a longitudinal observational study where all preterm infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit were prospectively followed from April to August 2012. The following nutrition practices were analyzed: time of enteral nutrition therapy initiation, time to achieve full enteral nutrition (120kcal/kg/day), complications related to enteral nutrition therapy, type of diet at the start of enteral trophic nutrition and type of diet at hospital discharge. The Pearson correlation was used to assess the degree of correlation between two continuous variables, where the statistical significance level was considered as p-value <0.05. The average initiation of enteral nutrition therapy was 22.4 (SD + 29.8) hours and the average time to achieve full enteral feeding was 9.5 (SD ± 3.2) days. Newborns with lower weight, gestational age and apgar score of 1 minutes had the longest start of enteral nutrition therapy (r = - 0,58; r = - 0,55; r = - 0,55; p < 0,001). A positive correlation (r = 0.41, p <0.026) between the start of enteral nutrition therapy and length of stay in the neonatal intensive care unit. Although advances in relation to the onset of enteral trophic nutrition have been observed, the progression this nutrition is still slow (< 20ml/kg/dia). Note that there is still a wide variation in the nutritional approach to premature newborns. Therefore, building nutritional protocols and the establishment of multidisciplinary team of nutritional therapy have been suggested in the literature.