Malnutrition, Undernutrition & Nutrition Support

Malnutrition wears many faces — the visibly wasted child, the frail older patient losing weight unnoticed in a hospital bed, the chronically ill adult whose body can no longer extract what it needs from food. Malnutrition, Undernutrition & Nutrition Support confronts this spectrum head-on, addressing one of the most persistent and under-recognised threats to health across both developing and developed settings. Far from being a problem of the past, malnutrition remains widespread, costly, and frequently missed until it has already done harm.

The session unpacks the condition in its full complexity. Undernutrition spans wasting, stunting, and micronutrient deficiency, while disease-related malnutrition quietly undermines recovery in clinical settings, prolonging illness and raising mortality. Crucially, the discussion turns to nutrition support — the structured response that ranges from dietary modification and oral nutritional supplements to enteral tube feeding and parenteral nutrition for those who cannot eat normally. How clinicians screen for risk, diagnose accurately, and select the right level of support forms a practical backbone of the programme.

Equally pressing are the questions of recognition and prevention. Why does malnutrition so often go undetected? How can routine screening catch it earlier? What strategies prevent the slide into deficiency before support becomes necessary? Clinical dietitians, physicians, nurses, public health practitioners, and humanitarian nutrition workers will find this session directly relevant, as will those advancing the management of nutritional deficiency in vulnerable groups. For attendees of the Nutrition Conference, it delivers an urgent message: that identifying and treating malnutrition is among the most cost-effective interventions in healthcare, capable of transforming outcomes when applied early and well.