Nutrition In Preoperative Pediatric Congenital Heart Disease

Introduction: The use of a nutritional protocols provides the standardization of assessment procedures and the optimization of nutritional status recovery of pre-surgical infants with Congenital Heart Disease (CHD). However, to our knowledge there are no validated instrument for presurgical nutritional support for infants with congenital heart disease (CHD) in Brazil. Objective: Assess the clinical effectiveness of the translated and cross-culturally adapted protocol, Nutritional Pathway for Infants with Congenital Heart Disease before Surgery (Marino et al., 2018), on the weight change of infants with congenital heart disease in two specialized cardiology hospitals in Southern Brazil in partnership with the UK research group that authored the original of protocol. Methods: A randomized, pragmatic clinical trial will be carried out. The sample will consist of children with CHD, between 0-12 months of age, awaiting cardiovascular corrective surgery from the Pediatric Outpatient Clinic in the Institute of Cardiology (IC) and Children\'s Hospital Santo Antonio of Santa Casa de Misericordia. The previously translated pre-surgical nutritional intervention protocol for infants with congenital heart disease will be compared with current routine nutritional guidelines used in the follow-up services of children with congenital heart disease in these institutions within the national public healthcare, SUS. Intended results: It is expected that the culturally-adapted pre-surgical nutritional support protocol for children with congenital heart disease will be effective in pre-surgical infant weight gain, which will likely improve surgical prognosis and clinical outcomes. And we hope that this protocol will promote the standardization of care, and will provide an empirically-based nutritional intervention that may improve the effectiveness of nutritional recovery in the CHD infants. Furthermore, the results may be used in the formulation of Brazilian guidelines for comprehensive care of children with congenital heart disease.