**8. Conclusion**

In the area of nutrition and HIV, children deserve special attention because of their additional needs to ensure growth and development and their dependency on adults for adequate care. Nutritional advice and support should be a priority component of the continuum of care for HIV-infected women and children. Furthermore, case by case, the special nutritional needs of children should be determined in light of the guidelines and recommendations adopted by various professional health and medical associations. Wasting and undernutrition in HIV-infected children reflect a series of failures within the health system, the home, and the community and not just a biological process related to virus and host interactions. In brief, despite the great impact of recent pharmacologic interventions, optimal nutrition continues to be essential therapy for HIV-infected children, and it has the potential to provide adjunct immunemodulatory therapy, thus improving care and outcomes of children with HIV/AIDS.

**25**

**Author details**

Abdo Jurjus<sup>5</sup>

Palermo, Italy

Inaya Hajj Hussein1

\*, Lara Youssef<sup>2</sup>

Beaumont School of Medicine, Rochester, MI, USA

and Virginia Uhley1

provided the original work is properly cited.

*HIV-Infected Children and Nutrition: The Friend and The Foe*

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.85417*

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

4 Department of Experimental and Clinical Neurosciences, University of Palermo,

5 Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology and Physiological Sciences, Faculty of

, Andrea Mladenovic3

1 Department of Foundational Medical Studies, Oakland University William

2 Faculty of Nursing and Health Sciences, Notre Dame University, Lebanon

3 School of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia

Medicine, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

\*Address all correspondence to: hajjhuss@oakland.edu

, Angelo Leone4

,
