Introduction:

The adequate monitoring of the nutritional status in young children is of great importance for their future development.

Objective:

To validate the predictive scale of failure to thrive in infants from Arroyo Naranjo municipality, Havana province.

Material and Methods:

An observational cohort study in infants from a municipality of Havana was carried out during the period from January 2016 to October 2018. It included a non-probabilistic sample that consists of 203 cases. The discrimination was carried out by means of the analysis of the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve and the calibration was done by the Hosmer-Lemeshow test.

Results:

The results show that 25,1 % of the infants presented failure to thrive, the male sex predominated in the sample (52,8 %) and of the risk factors studied, non-exclusive breastfeeding was present in 67,4 % of children with failure. The validation showed an excellent discriminant power with a value of the area under the curve of 0,93, while the calibration done by the Hosmer-Lemeshow test presented a global value of p <0,05 and a failure rate of 0.86. When applying the scale, the evaluation parameters of diagnostic accuracy had a sensitivity of 87,9 %, a specificity of 99,4, high predictive values, ​​and a positive likelihood ratio of 40.5.

Conclusions:

The predictive scale of failure to thrive in infants was very useful to predict cases of failure in the new population studied.

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