While most experts agree that children with diarrhea should be treated based on the severity of their dehydration, with children receiving intravenous fluids for severe dehydration and oral rehydration solution for mild to moderate dehydration, there is no clear consensus on how best to determine the severity of dehydration, especially in resource-limited settings. The gold standard for dehydration is percent volume loss with diarrhea, which is defined as the difference between pre-illness weight and acute-illness weight divided by pre-illness weight. Because pre-illness weight from a pediatrician's office is often not available, especially in low- and middle-income countries, it is ideally substituted by stable post-rehydration weight or the child's weight after undergoing therapy. In fact, Gorelick et al. validated post-rehydration weight as a surrogate for pre-illness weight by demonstrating near perfect correlation (r = 0.9988) between the two values in a small cohort of children with diarrhea [12]. In our study, we were not able to guarantee that participants had reached a stable post-rehydration weight prior to discharge. However, most children in the study by Gorelick et al. achieved a stable weight after 24 h in the hospital, and nearly all children achieved a stable weight by 72 h. Since all patients in our study spent at least 24 h in the hospital, and 88% spent more than 3 days, it is likely that they had the opportunity to achieve a stable rehydration weight, so we believe that percent weight change with rehydration can be used as a valid gold standard for dehydration in our study.
While percent weight change with rehydration makes an excellent gold standard for the severity of dehydration, it is not a useful tool in practice, since it is not available at the time of presentation when a decision about how best to manage a child with diarrhea must be made. For many years, experts have recommended the use of physical exam signs to predict the severity of dehydration in children with diarrhea. Steiner et al. found in a systematic review that the most useful individual signs for predicting 5% dehydration were abnormal capillary refill time, abnormal respiratory pattern, and abnormal skin turgor, which had positive likelihood ratios spanning from 2.0-4.1 [9]. However, none of these signs had very good negative likelihood ratios, meaning that they were not useful for excluding severe dehydration in children. Steiner et al. concluded that no individual clinical sign had adequate sensitivity and specificity for the prediction of dehydration. Other studies that have looked at laboratory values, such as BUN, anion gap, base deficit, bicarbonate concentration, and urine specific gravity, have generally not found them to be very good predictors of dehydration status, with only bicarbonate greater than 15 or 17 mEq/L useful for reducing the likelihood of dehydration [6, 13–16].
Given the limitations of individual clinical signs, several prior authors have tried to combine physical findings into clinical scales to predict percent dehydration in children. Gorelick created a 4-point and 10-point scale for assessing dehydration in children 1-60 months old presenting to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, resulting in sensitivities of 79% and 87% and specificities of 82% and 85%, respectively, for predicting ≥5% dehydration. The two scales had sensitivities of 82% and 90% and specificities of 83% and 90%, respectively, for ≥10% dehydration. The CDS was derived at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children and then prospectively validated at that site by specialized pediatric staff. In the validation study, Parkin et al. demonstrated likelihood ratios for moderate dehydration of 2.2, 1.3, and 5.2 for CDS scores of 0, 1-4, and 5-8, respectively [11, 17].
Neither the Gorelick scale nor the CDS performed as well in our population of children in Rwanda as they did in North America. In fact, both scales had areas under the ROC curves statistically indistinguishable from the reference line, meaning they were no better than chance at predicting moderate or severe dehydration. In addition, the WHO scale, considered the standard of care in most low- and middle-income countries, although it has never been prospectively validated for predicting severe dehydration, also performed poorly in our population of children. To our knowledge, this study is the first to prospectively assess a clinical dehydration scale in a low-income country, where children tend to present with more severe dehydration and be evaluated by personnel with less specialized training than their high-income country counterparts. Our study highlights the need for more research into better methods for detecting the severity of dehydration in children with diarrhea in resource-limited settings and supports a general rule that clinical scales derived in a high-income country setting require validation in resource-limited settings before being recommended for widespread use in these settings.
Limitations
Study subjects were a convenience sample based on investigator availability; overall, we enrolled about half of eligible patients. Our sample size was small, but powered to detect a negative likelihood ratio less than 0.1 and a positive likelihood ratio greater than 2. A priori, we had decided that for a clinical scale to be useful, it had to reduce the likelihood of severe dehydration by at least a factor of 10 when negative (so as not to miss any children who truly need IV fluids) while at least doubling the likelihood of severe dehydration when positive (so as to not to result in the wasted resources and adverse events that come from over-treating children with IV fluids who do not actually have severe dehydration). Essential data were missing for about 10% of enrolled patients, who were therefore excluded from analysis. In addition, only children admitted to the hospital were enrolled in our study in order to be able to obtain both pre- and post-rehydration weights for the purpose of determining the gold standard of percent weight change with rehydration. Therefore, the children enrolled in our study were likely more ill than the average child with diarrhea and/or vomiting in a low-income country setting, limiting the generizability of our results. We attempted to include only children who would have weight change based on rehydration by excluding those children presenting with severe malnutrition who would receive dietary supplementation. It is unlikely that children not receiving dietary supplementation would have gained weight from improved nutrition because 87% of children in our study spent less than 1 week in the hospital, so it is unlikely that they would have been able to gain a significant amount of protein-energy weight in that time period while being fed a standard Rwandan diet.