Feeding Difficulty and Poor Somatic Growth After Reparative Cardiac Surgery in Infants with Complex Congenital Heart Disease: Are We Missing Something Important?

Proper oral feeding skills lead to normal growth and development and are naturally granted in all healthy infants. Thus, failure to thrive and malnutrition in infants are concerning, and one must look for possible underlying reasons. Feeding difficulty and poor somatic growth due to inability to meet nutritional requirements frequently are encountered in infants with complex congenital heart disease (CHD), both before and after cardiac surgery. This substantially affects short-term and long-term well-being and neurodevelopmental outcomes.