Comportamento alimentar em crianças com deficiência mental e paralisia cerebral

Abstract

Feeding difficulties are frequent in children, and they are associated with a previous bad experience with food and/or texture or temperature aversions. Children with mental disabilities and/or cerebral palsy tend to have a higher risk of feeding difficulties and also tend to have poor nutrition, qualitatively, and quantitatively, which is associated with malnutrition. To study the eating behavior in children with mental disabilities and cerebral palsy, a study was conducted with 18 children ages 5 to 13 years. We measured children's anthropometric measurements and applied the Child Eating Behavior Questionnaire to the caregivers. We found that 89% of children (n = 16) were wasted, 44% (n = 8) were stunted, and 67% (n = 44) were underweight. Boys had higher satiety response (median = 2.80 vs. 1.80, p = 0.028), drinking desire (2.33 vs. 1.00, p = 0.035) and food fussiness (2.33 vs. 1.83, p = 0.045). Underweight children had more slow eating (median = 3.50 vs. 2.00, p = 0.047) and lower food response (3.00 vs. 3.40, p = 0.012) than normal weight ones. We didn't find significant differences based on children's communication and self-feeding skills, although children without communication skills tended to be younger and to present higher food avoidance and lower food attraction, while children without self-feeding skills tended to have higher food avoidance and emotional over-eating. Age wasn't significantly related to any subscales, but it showed a tendency to be positively associated with food attraction and negatively associated with food refusal, and the strongest correlation was between food fussiness and younger children (rs = -0.348, p = 0.157). In conclusion, children with mental disabilities and cerebral palsy's eating behavior is related to their weight class and sex, but not to their communication and self-feeding skills or age.