Its most immediate effect is the rapid weight loss As the body consumes reserves of fat and then muscle tissue.
With a diet of 1,600 calories a day, equivalent to half a kilo of grain, the body loses a quarter of its weight in two or three months.
This, the first stage of the food shortage, there is an image that television made familiar. This is the first stage of starvation.
For Starvation means a serious reduction in the provision of vitamins, nutrients and energy in general, is the most extreme form of malnutrition.
In humans, a state of prolonged starvation cause permanent damage to organs and cause death.
According to FAO, more than 25,000 people die of starvation every day, one child every five seconds.
Individuals suffering from starvation lose substantial fat and muscle because the body on turns to these tissues for energy.
The skin becomes hour after hour, dried and pallida.Gli adults often emaciated bodies and sunken abdomen, while the children have a belly swollen with the gases generated by bacteria that multiply in the stomach and intestines .
also reduces the activity occurs and general apathy. If the intake of food decreases again, there is a greater weight loss with an increase in the mortality rate.
Psychologically the desire for food is dominant All other emotions become blurred. There is a lowering of moral standards and under extreme conditions may apply to phenomena such as murder and cannibalism.
In this second phase, the body stops losing weight and begins to swell: there is the medieval age which was called "dropsy" She now goes by the name of edema, the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as "bulge all'imbibizione had interstitial tissue. "
The lack of protein it causes the shift of fluids from the vascular compartment to the interstitial tissue that, if injured by a needle, it produces the secretion of a fluid liquid coagulation.
Clinically, the MPE is presented in a dry form and wet.
The dry form, the chaos, comes from a fast and almost complete lack of protein that non-protein nutrients. The child with marasmus consumes very small quantities of food (often because his mother can not breastfeed) and is very thin for the loss of muscle mass and body fat.
The wet form is called Kwashiorkor , in the African world that means "first child-second child." This term refers to the fact that the first born child develop a MPE when the second child who replaces him in the womb. The weaned child is fed with little porridge oats that has little nutritional value (in comparison to breast milk) and can not grow.
The "Kwashiorkor" is due to a chronic deficiency of nutrients (iron, folic acid, iodine, selenium, viatamina C), in particular those with antioxidant nutrients. However, there are several explanations to explain the development of Kwashiorkor, and the topic remains controversial.
The symptoms of this disease include a swollen abdomen known as a "pot belly" (as the picture below) discoloration reddish hair and skin depigmentation.
