Nutrition and growth in pediatric renal transplant recipients.

Pediatric renal failure patients undergo similar rates of growth retardation on all forms of dialysis, but appears to be worst in the patients not dialyzed before transplant and on TF. These patients had an average age of 27 months before transplant. Table 1 shows that all groups undergo progressive decline in growth as the interval from diagnosis to transplant increases. This is not affected by the number of calories supplied. Pretransplant TF seems to improve catch up growth after transplant, but we saw no definite effect on growth in the pretransplant period. Renal transplantation uniformly improves growth in this population.