Nutritional Approach in Tropical Sprue Patients

Abstract

Tropical sprue (TS) is known to be a common malabsorption syndrome in tropical countries. The objective of the present review is to determine whether if there is new evidence for a specific nutritional approach for TS, since the management remains the same from several years ago and the treatment can also be confounded by other conditions such as celiac disease, tropical enteropathy, and parasitic infections. Tropical sprue accounts for a large proportion of cases of malabsorption in South Asia. Since tropical sprue requires a specific test for its diagnosis, it could have been mistaken with other conditions. However, epidemics of tropical sprue have not been reported. TS has been thought to be uncommon in the last decades. Still, more studies are needed to determine whether if TS is uncommon in tropical countries or has been undiagnosed since TS can overlap between other malabsorption syndromes or celiac disease. However, to better understand about tropical sprue, more research is needed, focused on epidemiology, etiology, differential diagnosis and treatment, and nutritional approaches.