A New Child dehydration test outperforms WHO standard?
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The ‘DHAKA score’ determines diarrhoeal dehydration levels better than the WHO algorithm
Doctors can now diagnose dehydration in kids faster and with greater accuracy
BUT Further studies are need to see how well the DHAKA score works in rural settings
Extract explanation of dehydration from Wong's Nursing of infants and children edited by Hockenberry and Wilson
A recent article by Naimul Haq highlights [DHAKA] A new diagnostic technique to determine dehydration caused by diarrhoea in children maybe more reliable and accurate than existing methods
The DHAKA (acronym for Dehydration: Assess Kids Accurately) score was tested on 496 under-five children under a validation study and the results published in Lancet Global Health.
Study revealed the DHAKA score as being significantly better in performance than the current standard, the WHO’s Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI).
Its expected to help doctors and nurses better diagnose children with dehydration from diarrhoea and improve their management.
Levine said his team compared the DHAKA score with the IMCI algorithm and found the former significantly more accurate. “This means that if doctors or nurses use the DHAKA score to assess the degree of dehydration in children with diarrhoea, they will be right more often than if they use the WHO IMCI algorithm.” Levine and co-scientists, including those from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), originally derived the DHAKA score in 2014 when they statistically determined which clinical signs best determined dehydration severity. They included general appearance, breathing anomalies, skin pinch slackness and production of tears.
Extract of checklist for dehydration from Wong's Nursing of infants and children edited by Hockenberry and Wilson
The DHAKA score showed significant accuracy, sensitivity and specificity in identifying no dehydration, moderate dehydration or severe dehydration. The definitive measure was made by comparing a child’s weight before and after full rehydration.
For the newly published study, Levine and his team performed another set of tests and validated the DHAKA score by testing its predictive value on 496 children determined to be suffering from acute diarrhoea.
The DHAKA score was particularly useful in identifying severe dehydration, because we “check for fewer parameters compared to the conventional method and in shorter time.”
The researchers suggest follow-up research to see if the DHAKA score is easier to use and more reliable than the WHO IMCI algorithm when used by nurses at rural health centres.
this information has been extracted from SCIDEV . For more visit
http://m.scidev.net/global/children/news/child-dehydration-test-who.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=SciDevNewsletter&utm_campaign=international%20SciDev.Net%20update%3A%2010%20October%202016
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