China's first research institute on clinical nutrition was set up recently in Zhongshan Hospital in Shanghai.
It will be the first such institute nationwide to carry out comprehensive and systematic research on clinical nutrition.
Different from daily nutrition or health care nutrition, clinical nutrition is a question of life and death, because the failure to absorb nutrition as a result of certain diseases may endanger the patient enormously.
Zhongshan Hospital is one of the earliest to do related research, and back in the 1960s had started research on providing nutrition outside intestines.
With newly developed clinical nutrition research results, the hospital has saved thousands of patients suffering from fatal diseases like consumption canal fistula or acute necrotic pancreatic inflammation through providing nutrition through their veins.
As a result, death rates of the above two diseases have dropped considerably from over 50 percent to lower than 5 percent, and from 30 percent to lower than 10 percent.
(Xinhua 03/19/2001)
