Background: Nutrition support is essential in children with cancer, including those undergoing bone marrow transplant (BMT), to reduce the risk of malnutrition and associated deleterious outcomes. Enteral nutrition is more commonly provided via nasogastric than gastrostomy tubes because of safety concerns with the latter in immunocompromised children. This systematic review investigated the incidence and type of complications and outcomes in pediatric cancer patients fed by gastrostomy. Methods: Databases were searched for randomized and observational studies investigating the use of any gastrostomy device in children aged <18 years with any cancer diagnosis, including those undergoing BMT. Five cohort and 11 case series studies were included. Owing to clinical heterogeneity, meta-analyses were not performed.Results: Quality of evidence varied, with five studies judged at serious risk of bias and poor quality; however, the remaining 11 were considered to range from moderate to good quality. Across studies, 54.6% of children developed one or more complications, of which 76.6% were classified as minor, 23.4% major. The most frequent complications included inflammation (52% of episodes), infection (42.1%), leakage (22.3%), and granuloma (21%). Evidence regarding infection rates in cancer/BMT patients compared with other disease states was inconclusive.Gastrostomy feeding was associated with improvement or stabilization of nutrition status in 77%-92.7% of children.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Nutrition support is essential in children with cancer, including those
undergoing bone marrow transplant (BMT), to reduce the risk of
malnutrition and associated deleterious outcomes. Enteral nutrition is
more commonly provided via nasogastric than gastrostomy tubes due to
safety concerns with the latter in immunocompromised children. This
systematic review investigated the incidence and type of complications
and outcomes in pediatric cancer patients fed by gastrostomy. Across
studies, 54.6% of children developed ≥1 complication, of which 76.6%
were classified as minor, 23.4% major. The most frequent complications
included inflammation (52% of episodes), infection (42.1%), leakage
(22.3%) and granuloma (21%). Evidence regarding infection rates in
cancer/BMT patients compared with other disease states was inconclusive.
Gastrostomy feeding was associated with improvement or stabilization of
nutritional status in 77-92.7% of children. Gastrostomy feeding in this
population is safe and effective in stabilizing or improving nutritional
status throughout treatment. Complications are frequent but mostly
minor.
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