Funding outcome

Babies with short bowel syndrome (SBS) are missing some of their intestine and so cannot absorb nutrition well enough to survive and grow. They depend on intravenous nutrition, called parenteral nutrition (PN), but because of this they face many ongoing life threatening complications. We want to improve nutrient absorption and help them stop this PN as soon as possible. Dietary fat malabsorption is the biggest problem for these babies and so we use special baby formulas enriched with special fats (medium chain triglycerides or MCT), however fats are not the best to help the intestine to grow and recover from SBS (where the more common long chain triglycerides or LCT is superior). This is an added problem for stopping the PN. This research will study a special dietary fat product, a structured lipid supplement (SLS), designed to have special ease of digestion and absorption of LCT-fat even for babies with SBS. Before testing something new in very sick babies with SBS on PN, we will use our neonatal piglet model of SBS. These piglets have been shown to have the exact same problems with digestion and absorption as do babies with SBS. We will study how piglets given the SLS compared to those given a MCT-formula grow, absorb fat, have intestinal growth, and tolerate the formula. We believe we will show that SLS is better than the MCT-formula and so should be studied next in babies with SBS. To date no specific baby formulas have been designed for SBS and this is a major gap that this study will help address.