Improving nutrition in cystic fibrosis: A systematic literature review

With increasing life expectancy of patients with cystic fibrosis (CF), gastrointestinal manifestations of the disease have been increasingly brought into focus. This was a systematic review of the PubMed database and ongoing phase III clinical trials that aimed to summarize recent (published after June 1 2016) studies reporting the effects of nutritional interventions on anthropometric measures (weight, height, and body mass index) in patients with CF. Two ongoing trials and 40 published studies (18 interventional and 22 observational) were identified. Key results supported the benefits of comprehensive, individualized nutritional plans, high-fat, high-calorie diet including high-quality carbohydrates, and enteric tube feeding (albeit the latter was derived from observational studies only). In contrast, the supplementation of probiotics, lipids, docosahexaenoic, glutathione, or antioxidant-enriched multivitamin appeared to have little effect on anthropometric measures.