Malnutrition
30 May, 08 | by Ian Wacogne
In a cohort of 89 Malawian children with malnutrition 84 (96%) had echocardiographically measurable pericardial effusion on admission, of which only 16 had TB, which was previously thought to be an underlying cause for the effusion.
This is a very interesting bit of hypothesis testing; conventional “wisdom” says that if you’ve got a pericardial effusion when you present with malnutrition, then this is caused by your co-existent TB. This group have shown that this simply isn’t true; they demonstrate that nearly all children have effusion if you look hard enough, that the more oedema you have with your malnutrition the bigger your effusion, and postulate that the underlying mechanism for oedema and effusion are the same.
