Preoperative nutrition intervention program increases cleft surgery eligibility in the low- and middle-income country setting.

Background: Children with cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P) are highly susceptible to malnutrition, which may restrict surgery eligibility and delay repair. Preoperative nutrition programs for children with unrepaired CL/P are an effective treatment to overcome malnutrition for safe surgical intervention in high-resource settings; however, the effectiveness of such programs has not been demonstrated in the setting of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We studied the impact of a preoperative nutrition program on improving nutritional status and achieving surgical eligibility for children with CL/P.