ABSTRACT
Objective@#To screen the hospitalized children with pectus excavatum for nutritional status, and to analyze the influencing factors of nutritional status, then to provide the scientific basis for comprehensive management of clinical nutrition.@*Methods@#The body mass index (BMI) of 360 hospitalized children with pectus excavatum in Guangzhou Women and Children′s Medical Center from January 2013 to December 2017 were reviewed and compared with World Health Organization standard and the emaciation rate was calculated.The influencing factors such as CT index, age, weight, height, sex, the width of thorax and surgical treatment were analyzed with BMI.@*Results@#Compared with the lowest standard of BMI, the whole emaciation rate of hospitalized children with pectus excavatum was 93.61% (337/360 cases): in which severe, moderate and slight emaciation were 74.17% (267/360 cases), 13.33% (48/360 cases), and 6.11% (22/360 cases), respectively.BMI was negatively related with CT index (r=-0.172, P=0.001), but positively related with age, weight, height, and the width of thorax (r=0.129, 0.342, 0.022, 0.179, P=0.014, 0.001, 0.673, 0.001). Three years after Nuss procedure, both the whole and severe emaciation rate decreased (93.62% vs. 95.74%; 65.96% vs. 78.72%), but the weight, height and BMI increased [25.5(12.5, 38.5) kg vs.17.0(10.0, 24.0) kg; 126.0(99.0, 153.0) cm vs.108.0(74.5, 143.5) cm; 14.69(12.38, 17.00) kg/m2 vs. 14.36(12.17, 16.56) kg/m2], and the differences were significant (all P<0.01).@*Conclusions@#There is a high nutritional risk in hospitalized children with pectus excavatum, and the deformity severity is the main risk factor.Surgical treatment can improve the nutritional status effectively, but the malnutrition in pectus excavatum can not be corrected completely.