Infantile Thiamine Deficiency: New Insights into an Old Disease

ABSTRACT

Context The wide spectrum of clinical presentation in infantile thiamine deficiency is difficult to recognize, and the diagnosis is frequentlymissed due to the lack of widespread awareness, and non-availability of costly and technically demanding investigations. Evidenceacquisition The topic was searched by two independent researchers using online databases of Google scholar and PubMed. Weconsidered the related studies published in the last 20 years. The terms used for the search were ‘thiamine’, ‘thiamine deficiency’, ‘beri-beri’, ‘B-vitamins’,‘micronutrients’, ‘malnutrition’, ‘infant mortality’. ‘Wernicke’s syndrome’,‘Wernicke’s encephalopathy’, and ‘lacticacidosis’. Results: In the absence of specific diagnostic tests, a low threshold for a therapeutic thiamine challenge is currently the bestapproach to diagnose infantile thiamine deficiency in severe acute conditions. The practical approach is to consider thiamine injection asa complementary resuscitation tool in infants with severe acute conditions; more so in presence of underlying risk factors, clinicallyevident malnutrition or where a dextrose-based fluid is used for resuscitation. Further, as persistent subclinical thiamine deficiency duringinfancy can have long-term neuro-developmental effects, reasonable strategy is to treat pregnant women suspected of having thedeficiency, and to supplement thiamine in both mother and the baby during breastfeeding. Conclusions: Health care professionals in thecountry need to be sensitized to adopt a high level of clinical suspicion for thiamine deficiency and a low threshold for the administration ofthiamine, particularly when infantile thiamine deficiency is suspected.