Original articleClinical Efficacy and Safety of Parenteral Nutrition in Adolescent Girls with Anorexia Nervosa
Section snippets
Methods
All patients were followed at the Neuropsychiatry Unit of our Hospital, that is the major Italian Centre for the management of eating disorders at pediatric and adolescent age.
Treatment of both AN outpatients and inpatients was entrusted to a multidisciplinary team composed by specialized psychiatric nursing staff, dietitians, psychologists, and numerous medical experts, including a psychiatrist, gastroenterologist, cardiologist, endocrinologist and dentist.
Anthropometric measurements
Table 1 shows all data regarding anthropometric measurements at admission and at discharge in both groups in which discharge weight, BMI, and percentage of ideal body weight values were significantly higher than those registered at admission.
Medical history
Rates of psychiatric comorbidity are reported in Table 1. In all, 28 patients in PN-treated group and 13 in orally treated group showed comorbid psychiatric problems. These were represented by severe depression in 15, anxiety disorders in 13,
Discussion
Nutritional rehabilitation in adolescent girls with AN is aimed at promoting metabolic recovery, restoring a healthy body weight, and improving eating habits and psychological behavior. Our experience confirms the clinical efficacy of nutritional treatment for AN patients. Severe malnutrition could require the use of artificial nutrition to rapidly correct dangerous clinical conditions and to reverse medical complications. However, because forced PN or EN refeeding can be accompanied by
Conclusion
In conclusion, nutritional rehabilitation represents an essential part of AN treatment. Although this intervention alone does not guarantee a favorable outcome, the patient’s chances of success have dramatically improved. Among all nutritional rehabilitation strategies, PN offers a useful alternative for successfully treating AN patients when nasogastric feeding (preferred by most physicians) is not possible, either because it is not allowed in a psychiatric unit or because an adult patient or
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