In a new study published on World Smile Day, Smile Train and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine discover that access to adequate nutrition and surgical care could prevent nearly half of cleft-related malnutrition deaths in children under 5 worldwide.

The report offers a groundbreaking examination of the devastating effects of orofacial clefts from 2000 to 2020. Clefts can make it difficult to eat, breathe, speak, hear, and develop certain body parts and structures properly during foetal development. The report combined two sets of data, one from Smile Train Express and the other from the demographic segment of IHME’s Global Burden of Disease Modeling. Two meta-regression models were used by the researchers to compute results after pairing and aligning the datasets.

Source: Prnewswire