Question

Protein deficiency leads to
(a)Kwashiorkor
(b)Marasmus
(c)Cretinism
(d)Both a and b

Answer 1

Hint: One’s occurrence increases before age 1, whereas other occurrence increases after 18 months. It can be distinguished from one is the result of protein deficiency with adequate energy intake whereas other is the result of inadequate energy intake in all forms including protein.

Complete answer:
A condition is a result of eating a diet that does not supply a healthy amount of one or more nutrients is called malnutrition which includes such a diet where too little nutrients are present or there are so many so that the diet causes health problems. The nutrients that are involved in this condition can be calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, vitamins, or minerals.
Deficiency diseases are caused when some critical nutrient is absent in the diet or is available in highly reduced amounts. For example, Kwashiorkor and Marasmus are common protein deficiency diseases. A disease called kwashiorkor due to protein deficiency which commonly affects infants and children between 1 to 3 years of age. The patients show symptoms like underweight children, stunted growth, poor brain development loss of appetite, anemia, dermatitis on the lower leg, and face. The proteins are necessary for growth, repair of tissue, and body defense, therefore, an adequate amount of proteins must be present in the diet. In a healthy person, the daily requirement of protein is 1 gm per kg. body weight in adults and 2 gm protein per kg body weight in growing children. Some good protein sources in food are cereals, pulses, meat, fish, milk, groundnut, peas, etc. Another disease called marasmus is due to the protein-energy-malnutrition (PEM) or deficiency of protein. The cure to this is a diet with adequate proteins and proper caloric value should be given.

Additional information:
1) A shrunken, wasted appearance, loss of muscle mass, and subcutaneous fat mass body represented a patient with marasmus where buttocks and upper limb muscle groups are usually more affected than others.
2) The causes of marasmus are the following factors like maternal malnutrition, maternal anemia, parental ignorance, poverty; also some pathological conditions in a baby (e.g., diarrhea), pneumonia, cyanotic heart diseases, necrotizing enterocolitis, pyloric stenosis, lactose intolerance, meningitis.
3) In 1935 a Jamaican pediatrician Cicely Williams introduced the term kwashiorkor, two years after she published the disease's first formal description.
4) The name kwashiorkor is derived from the Ga language of coastal Ghana, translated as "the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes" or "the disease of the deposed child".

So, the correct answer is ‘Both a and b’.

Note: Kwashiorkor’s precise etiology remains unclear. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the aspects of the pathophysiology of kwashiorkor, but not all. This includes but is not limited to protein deficiency causing hypoalbuminemia, amino acid deficiency, oxidative stress, and gut microbiome changes. Kwashiorkor may develop in at-risk populations after a mother weans her child from breast milk, replacing it with a diet high in carbohydrates, such as a maize diet.