Nutrients. 2022 Nov 4;14(21):4660. doi: 10.3390/nu14214660.

Jeffery Bettag ¹, Loren Po ¹, Cassius Cunningham ¹, Rahul Tallam ¹, Kento Kurashima ¹, Aakash Nagarapu ¹, Chelsea Hutchinson ², Sylvia Morfin ¹, Mustafa Nazzal ², Chien-Jung Lin ¹, Amit Mathur ¹, Rajeev Aurora ¹, Ajay K Jain ¹

Author information

¹Department of Pediatrics, Saint Louis University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, MO 63103, USA.

²Department of Surgery, Saint Louis University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, MO 63103, USA.

Abstract

Short bowel syndrome (SBS) is a particularly serious condition in which the small intestine does not absorb sufficient nutrients for biological needs, resulting in severe illness and potentially death if not treated. Given the important role of the gut in many signaling cascades throughout the body, SBS results in disruption of many pathways and imbalances in various hormones. Due to the inability to meet sufficient nutritional needs, an intravenous form of nutrition, total parental nutrition (TPN), is administered. However, TPN presents difficulties such as severe liver injury and altered signaling secondary to the continued lack of luminal contents. This manuscript aims to summarize relevant studies into the systemic effects of TPN on systems such as the gut-brain, gut-lung, and gut-liver axis, as well as present novel therapeutics currently under use or investigation as mitigation strategies for TPN induced injury.