Paediatric clinical nutrition and metabolic care

摘要

It gives us great joy to announce that this issue of the journal contains for the first time a special section dedi-' cated to Paediatric Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care. We wish to express our sincere thanks and appreciation to the editors and the publisher for their enthusiastic support for adding this focus. Indeed, it seems most appropriate to dedicate a specific section to childhood, considering the specific metabolic and nutritional conditions during this period of life, and their important consequences for health and development. In fact, metabolism and nutrition play a much greater role in paediatric medicine than in most, if not all, other medical specialties. This has been the case since the very beginning of paediatrics as a separate specialty in the 19th century. At that time, infant mortality was extremely high: in some parts of Europe and North America about half of all children died before school age, primarily due to infections and malnutrition. Many of the early pioneers of paediatrics, who were confronted in their clinical work with the very direct and immediate consequences of an unbalanced substrate supply in young children, engaged in research on metabolic needs and dietary supply of children . Their findings contributed greatly to improving child health and to reducing mortality. Over time until the present day, continued research has led to a general appreciation that metabolic and nutritional factors are of major importance for health and disease of children, who have high substrate requirements due to their growth, but often immature homeostatic mechanisms and limited body stores . The papers published in this issue of the journal highlight some of the new knowledge that has recently evolved in this area