Diarrhea is the second leading cause of death in children worldwide, and accurately assessing dehydration status remains a crucial step in preventing morbidity and mortality from this disease. While children with severe dehydration require immediate treatment with intravenous fluids, children with mild to moderate dehydration have a significant reduction in hospital length of stay and fewer adverse events when treated with relatively inexpensive oral rehydration solution (ORS). While several clinical scales have been developed for assessing dehydration in children, these scales have never been prospectively validated in a low-income country setting, where the vast majority of diarrhea morbidity and mortality occurs in children. The investigators hypothesize that new clinical and ultrasound-based tools will improve the diagnosis of severe dehydration in children with diarrhea in low-income countries, reducing the morbidity and mortality that occurs as a result of under-diagnosis of severe dehydration as well as the adverse events and inappropriate utilization of scarce resources that occurs as a result of over-diagnosis of severe dehydration.
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Area under the Receiver-Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve for predictors of severe diarrheal disease
Timeframe: 2 weeks