PERSPECTIVE
Failure to thrive
Failure to think about failure to thrive
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor N J Spencer
School of Health and Social Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK;n.j.spencer@warwick.ac.uk
Perspective on the paper by Olsen et al (see 109)
Abbreviations: FTT, failure to thrive
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Failure to thrive (FTT) or weight faltering has been regarded as an important problem in infancy1 associated with a range of paediatric conditions from coeliac disease2 to sudden infant death syndrome.3 Growth monitoring, perhaps the most common child surveillance activity,4 aims, among other things, to identify faltering growth,5 and generates frequent paediatric referrals.6 However, as Olsen et al7 show, the definition of FTT is open to dispute, raising questions about the value of the weight component of growth monitoring and the continued place of weight faltering as a useful marker of disease and impaired infant development.
Despite its established place in the paediatric literature (a Medline search limited to all infants and humans only with "failure to thrive" as the keyword yields >2000 references), there is no consensus on its precise definition. Undernutrition is thought to underlie FTT,8 and a recent review of articles published between January
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