Refeeding for Severe Malnutrition
Medically-Supervised Weight Restoration
If you’re suffering from severe malnutrition resulting from advanced disease or illness including liver failure, cancer, HIV or NTM (aka MAI), and your BMI is < 15, you may not meet minimum BMI requirements to begin—or continue—a lifesaving treatment or surgery.
If the only thing standing between you and a lifesaving treatment or surgery is safely gaining weight, ACUTE can help. We are the world’s expert specialist in treating malnutrition and facilitating medically-supervised weight restoration. No matter where you live, or the complexity of your medical situation, ACUTE can help you gain weight and restore nutritional status giving you the best opportunity for hope, survival and recovery.
Why ACUTE?
Physicians in traditional medical settings are unlikely to have specific expertise in the medical complications that can occur when refeeding extremely underweight patients, including:
- Managing blood chemistry abnormalities
- Avoiding refeeding syndrome
- Delivering safe oral, enteral or parenteral nutrition
- Managing nutritional rehabilitation alongside advanced disease or infection
For severely malnourished patients with a BMI < 15, it may be necessary to initiate nutritional rehabilitation on ACUTE’s specialized inpatient medical unit with robust training and expertise in navigating the medical pitfalls of refeeding.
ACUTE’s experts span several disciplines—including internal medicine, nursing, and dietary—and carefully initiate nutritional replenishment with concurrent blood chemistry and vitals monitoring, tailored to each patient’s diagnoses and risk factors. This includes physical therapy to help the deconditioned body and give patients the strength and mobility to engage in further treatment.
Alongside world-class medically supervised refeeding, ACUTE offers emotional support through skilled behavioral providers to simultaneously address any co-occurring psychiatric concerns, or simply deal with the emotional burden of serious illness.
National Experts in Saving Lives from Malnutrition
At ACUTE, we are 100% focused on the treatment of patients with extreme eating disorders and malnutrition stemming from serious illness or infections. Through evidence-based research, our experts understand the complexities of safely stabilizing and weight-restoring these highly vulnerable patients. We know what to expect and how to make our patients as comfortable as possible, both physically and emotionally.
Patients travel to ACUTE from across the country and around the world. Air ambulance transfer is available (and often covered under the medical insurance benefit) for patients who are too ill or medically unstable to drive or fly commercially to the unit at Denver Health Medical Center. ACUTE’s admissions team handles all logistics of the bedside-to-bedside transfer on a medically configured Learjet to ensure safe domestic and international patient transfer from hospitals and treatment centers around the world.