Feeding Approach to Optimizing Nutrition in Infants with Congenital Heart Disease

Congenital heart disease (CHD) affects 1% of live births globally. Infants with CHD often experience growth faltering and malnutrition due to increased metabolic demands, malabsorption, and feeding intolerance, further worsened by surgical interventions and frequent hospitalizations. Malnutrition in this population is linked to higher morbidity, extended hospital stays, and poor neurodevelopmental outcomes. The physiological diversity among CHD types presents significant challenges in developing a universal feeding strategy to optimize nutrition. This narrative review explores the interplay between CHD physiology and nutritional management. CHD types could be categorized into three hemodynamic groups—systemic hypoperfusion, global hypoxia, and pulmonary overcirculation—which help to consider a feeding approach based on such physiology. Nutritional management in these infants could be further tailored based on the disease severity, co-morbidities, and evolving hemodynamic changes. Based on clinical opinions, this review proposes a hemodynamic-focused risk-stratified feeding approach, considering ways that may enhance growth while possibly minimizing complications such as necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), pulmonary overload, and worsening heart failure. This approach may help individualize nutritional management to address the complex needs of infants with CHD. Further quality improvement studies are needed to assess this approach. Beyond meeting macronutrient needs, micronutrients, including zinc, thiamine, magnesium, vitamin A, and calcium, potentially play a role in cardiovascular health. Given the complexity of nutritional management in these infants, a multidisciplinary team may be needed to optimize care, including cardiologists, neonatologists, pediatricians, dietitians, speech therapists, and pharmacists. With the current knowledge gap and lack of strong evidence, research should focus on nutritional interventions and study their potential impact on infant outcomes with CHDs.