Enteral nutrition in palliative medicine in children

Complete care of a patient is important in palliative medicine. The necessity of nutrition support is determined by the severity of nutritive, trophic deficit, features of diseases which can cause (or which have already caused) protein-energy deficiency. Nutritive support is a multidisciplinary problem: it concerns not only a dietitian and an intensive care specialist but also a surgeon, a gastroenterologist, an oncologist, a dentist and other specialists who face patients unabled to satisfy their needs by physiological way. The feeding using gastral tube or gastrostomy should be special because oral cavity is switched off the nutrition. Efficiency of treatment rises while adapting enteral nutrition to specialties of digestion and metabolism in various types of pathology. Gastroenteric tube feeding plays a major role in the management of patients with poor voluntary intake, chronic neurological or mechanical dysphagia or gut dysfunction and in patients who are critically ill. Enteral nutrition is often used for children as well as for adults. Children may require enteral feeding for a wide range of underlying conditions, such as for malnutrition, for increased energy requirement, for metabolic disorders and also for children with neuromuscular disorders. Two main steps help to solve the problem of malnutrition: choosing the composition of formula and choosing the way to deliver the formula. This article gives a specification in using various feeding formulas according to different diseases and describes different ways to deliver the formula (from gastral tube to gastrostomy). If swallowing reflex is absent the formula should be delivered directly to stomach. The best way for a long-term or permanent nutrition support is feeding using gastrostomy. This article describes some surgical aspects of different types of gastrostomy from classical one to modern percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy.