Wasting is a form of malnutrition that is too low weight for a person’s height. It can be the consequence of a poor diet, an illness or an increase in the body’s needs.

Malnutrition is the consequence of an imbalance in the energy balance between food intake and the body’s needs. It can be a deficiency or an excess in the energy or nutritional intake of a person.

This includes a number of conditions:

• stunting: low relationship between height and age;
• wasting: low ratio between weight and height;
• underweight: low ratio between weight and age;
• micronutrient deficiencies (essential vitamins and minerals);
• overweight, obesity.

Nutrition-related noncommunicable diseases.

Malnutrition exists in all countries of the world. It affects adults as well as children. Some are overweight or obese, while others are underweight or wasted. According to the World Health Organization, there are 1,9 billion overweight or obese adults in the world and 462 million underweight. Among children under the age of five, 52 million are affected by wasting (including 17 million by severe wasting) and 41 million by overweight or obesity.

The definition of wasting is too low a weight-to-height ratio, which means being too light in relation to being too tall. It is often a sign of recent and significant weight loss due to too little food ingested or too much loss caused by an illness such as severe diarrhea or diabetes.

Emaciation can have multiple causes:

• too low food intake because of a socio-economic context that does not allow a balanced diet and in sufficient quantities. This is the case with many affected children in third world countries;
• too low food intake which is the consequence of a mental problem such as eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, etc.), anxiety or depression;
• excessive elimination of nutrients by the body (urinary losses in the event of diabetes, diarrhea and / or consequent vomiting, metabolic disturbances leading to increased consumption of energy by the cells, etc.).
• poor absorption of nutrients by the body (in the event of a problem of chronic inflammation or chronic disease of the intestine for example).

Significant and rapid weight loss can have a very deleterious effect on the body. It causes a decrease in the effectiveness of the immune system, a reduction in muscle strength, difficulty for certain organs to function normally and a general state of weakness.

In young children, wasting can have serious consequences, including death. It is therefore important to detect and treat it. Across the world, undernutrition plays a role in about 45% of deaths of children under five.

For the medical team, the first step will be to find the underlying causes of wasting and to identify the patients who can benefit from nutritional support: define the current situation, its possible stability, its possible evolution, the context socioeconomic.

The possible treatments are as follows, in order of installation:

• enriched diet: the patient’s diet is enriched with proteins and adapted according to his tastes (which may change in the event of chemotherapy, for example);
• oral food supplements: they are added to the normal diet to try to compensate for any deficiencies;
• Enteral Nutrition: When the digestive tract is functioning properly and is able to absorb nutrients, enteral nutrition is the first artificial nutrition method that can be implemented. It consists of administering the nutrients contained in a bag in liquid form directly into the stomach or intestine using a probe;
• Parenteral nutrition: When natural feeding is no longer possible and the digestive tract is damaged, parenteral nutrition is used to provide for the nutritional needs of the body. The term parenteral means “bypassing the digestive tract”. With this method, the nutrients do not pass through the digestive tract at all but directly into the bloodstream.

In the event of significant, rapid and involuntary weight loss, it is advisable to consult a health professional.