Nutritional Phenotyping in Pediatric and Young-Onset Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Growth, Body Composition, and Micronutrient Disturbances

Pediatric and young-onset inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is frequently accompanied by complex nutritional and metabolic disturbances that have significant impact on both acute disease outcomes and long-term growth and development. In contrast to adult-onset IBD, early-life disease emerges during crucial periods of growth, pubertal maturation, and major shifts in body composition. This developmental vulnerability makes comprehensive nutritional assessment not just supportive but fundamental to patient care. Children and adolescents with IBD may display impaired height velocity, delayed puberty, disproportionate muscle or fat compartments, sarcopenia, reduced intake, and multiple micronutrient deficiencies, even when traditional clinical markers are only mildly altered. However, there remain important knowledge gaps in defining, monitoring, and interpreting these nutritional phenotypes in the pediatric and young-onset population.

Recent evidence underscores the need for better tools and frameworks to identify at-risk patients, capture dynamic changes in anthropometric and body composition parameters, and clarify how nutritional imbalances interact with disease activity, therapy response, quality of life, and long-term outcomes. Although nutritional interventions receive increasing attention, clinically actionable guidance rooted in precise phenotyping and longitudinal risk profiling is still lacking. Ongoing debates concern the best modalities for growth assessment, body composition analysis, micronutrient monitoring, and integrating mechanistic insights from inflammation, metabolism, and the gut microbiome into clinical practice.

This Research Topic aims to consolidate and advance the concept of nutritional phenotyping in pediatric and young-onset IBD by catalyzing methodologically robust, clinically relevant research. We seek to (1) clarify how nutritional phenotypes such as stunting, delayed puberty, altered body composition, sarcopenia, and deficiency states can be defined and monitored; (2) connect these phenotypes to inflammatory activity, treatment response, and life-stage transitions; and (3) foster the development of individualized, evidence-based nutritional care. Key questions include which markers best predict risk, which assessment modalities yield the most clinically useful data, how nutritional trajectories influence outcomes, and how tools such as body composition analysis, micronutrient biomarkers, and risk scores can be refined for children, adolescents, and young adults with IBD.

To ensure focus, this Research Topic will concentrate on the clinical evaluation and management of nutritional phenotypes rather than broad dietary interventions across all ages or purely basic science studies. To gather further insights into this emerging area, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to:

• Growth trajectories, height velocity, and developmental nutritional risk.
• Anthropometry, body composition, sarcopenia, and altered muscle/fat compartments.
• Micronutrient deficiencies, biomarkers, prevalence, and supplementation outcomes.
• Longitudinal nutritional monitoring and risk profiling strategies.
• Symptom-oriented nutrition support and diet therapy when directly linked to phenotypic change.
• Translational studies on inflammation, metabolism, oxidative stress, gut microbiota with clinical nutrition implications.
• Connections between nutritional phenotypes and disease activity, therapy, quality of life, or transition to adult care.

Article types could include original research, clinical trials, reviews, mini-reviews, methods, study protocols, brief research reports, and perspectives.

Topic Editor Dr. Ligia Yukie Sassaki receives consulting fees from Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, and Nestlé; and is serving as a principal investigator in clinical trials sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, Takeda, MSD, and Genentech/Roche. All other Topic Editors do not have any conflicts of interest to be disclosed.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Pediatric Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Young-Onset IBD, Nutritional Phenotyping, Growth Impairment, Body Composition, Sarcopenia, Micronutrient Deficiencies, Longitudinal Nutritional Monitoring

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.