Natasha Lelijveld and Marie McGrath attended the N&G in Athens in February 2025, a conference that covers a broad range of nutritional issues, both clinical and community nutrition, and issues affecting high-income as well as low-income contexts. Natasha identified some key focuses plus favourite sessions.
The conference had a heavy ‘industry’ sponsorship presence, which clearly influenced the agenda. Several of the sessions focused on pharmaceutical approaches to nutritional challenges. The first session of the conference was industry sponsored with Mandy Ow (Singapore) presenting research findings in Vietnam on oral nutrition supplements for children under 5 with stunting which was found successful in helping children gain height-for-age. However, given the nutrition transition and the huge role of ‘big food’ particularly in South Asian food systems for children, it would be pertinent to be cautious about promoting high-energy pharmaceutical products; funding could be better spent on social protection programming and health pre-school meals for children.
Another interesting development was a MUAC-for-age z-score tape (manufactured by Abbot) used from ages 2 months to 18 years. While these are arguably unnecessary for the 6-59 months where one cut-off value can be used for all, the very young infants and the adolescent group do need age-adjusted z-scores due to their rapidly growing arms. Unfortunately, the tapes did not use the WHO growth references, but rather NHANES references from the USA. However, they could be a great reference point to make a similar tape which could be used for identifying wasting and overweight in school-age children and adolescents.
Besides industry-sponsored sessions, there were also lots of great research on undernutrition in infants and older children from academic researchers and NGOs. One of Natasha’s favourite sessions was by Ener Dinleyci (Turkey) whose research findings concluded that, although “biotics” were well tolerated, there was no evidence that adding human milk-like oligosaccharides, prebiotics, synoptics, nor postbiotics had any clinical benefits compared to control formula milks. He ended his presentation with a reminder that healthy happy mothers, and breastfeeding are still the most beneficial feeding strategies for infants.
Natasha didn’t only attend as a participant, but also as a speaker, presenting on long-term consequences of surviving child malnutrition (survive and thrive) alongside Getu Gizaw (Ethiopia) and Gerard Bryan Gonzales (Belgium). The three presentations cohesively explained that more children are now suffering from but surviving severe acute malnutrition (SAM) since globally, hunger is on the rise. Despite this, treatment coverage and effectiveness have improved considerably in the past couple of decades. The session concluded by emphasising that the first 1000 days of life is important but so might be the “next 7000 days”, with longer-term interventions in later childhood and adolescence helping individuals reach their full physical, developmental, cognitive, and social potential. Presenters called for more research into how to support children post-discharge from SAM treatment, and how to catch children before they deteriorate into severe malnutrition.
Overall, the conference was insightful and demonstrated a lot of basic science research which could have significant benefits for programming and the care of nutritionally vulnerable infants and children. Maximising our programming to ensure the short-term and long-term health of the world’s children is at the forefront of current research.