Evaluation of Albumin and Ischemia Modified Albumin Levels in Children with Acute Malnutrition

Abstract

Background: Children are significantly more likely to be malnourished due to their special nutritional needs for growth. Ischemia Modified Albumin (IMA) is a new marker of ischemia that occurs when serum albumin comes in contact with the heart's ischemic tissues. IMA has been used to measure several acute conditions but has never been used to measure acute malnutrition in children. This study aims to examine albumin and IMA in malnourished children to see if they can be used as markers of malnutrition in children. Materials and Methods: 84 children were examined (41 boys and 43 girls, mean age (SD): 6.18 (3.89); range: 0.92-16.75 years) who were referred to the hospital from 20 October to May 20, 2020. A physician performed nutrition examinations on children. BMI of less than 18.5 was considered malnourished children. The hypothesis of the normality of variables was accepted with the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. To study the difference in variables means at groups, the T-test and Phi-Correlation were used. The ANCOVA was used to study the relationship between variables and Albumin and IMA values at different levels. Results: The amount of albumin in the study group ranged from 4.10 to 5.15 (mean ± SD 4.82± 0.17), and the IMA range in the study group was 0.56 to 1.25 (mean ± SD 0.74± 0.13). The amount of albumin in the control group ranged from 4.19 to 5.19 (mean ± SD 4.83± 0.18), and the IMA range in the control group was 0.44 to 1.11 (mean ± SD 0.67± 0.13). No significant difference was observed between the albumin values (p-value = 0.752) between malnourished and healthy children. However, the IMA level in malnourished children was significantly higher (p-value = 0.19) than in healthy children. Conclusions: Although albumin was not significantly different between the two groups, the IMA of malnour-ished children was significantly higher than that of healthy children. This result means that IMA can be used as a marker for malnutrition in children. This study is a preliminary study showing that IMA can be used as a malnutrition marker in children with malnutrition and we believe that it will contribute to the literature.