Prevalence of Malnutrition in Home Hospitalization Patients

Abstract

Objective: To estimate the prevalence of malnutrition in patients admitted to the UHD of the General University Hospital of Alicante.

Material and methods: Prospective longitudinal study of a sample of 386 patients admitted to UHD randomly selected. Patients were evaluated with the HEN Nutritional Assessment Tool [https://www.evalnut.com/]. During the years 2016-2017.

Results: The 386 selected patients had an average age of 72.87 years. 51.7 percent of them were male and 42.1 percent had a level of illness “acute mild / chronic stable” (Fig. 1). 24 of the patients (9.2 percent) were gastrostomy carriers. 42.1 percent of patients did not cover 75 percent of daily energy requirements. 69.7 percent of patients lost weight before admission in the HaD [mean 10.1 ± 6.1 percent of their usual weight], independent of sex (p = 0.343) and age (p = 0.712), presenting higher lost weight those who had done for more than a month (p <0.001), as well as those in whom the severity of the disease had increased (p <0.001) and not related to the decrease in reported intake (p = 0.395). 21.5 percent of patients had difficulty chewing and 18.4 percent of them had dysphagia (Fig2) of which 91.3 percent was from liquids. 91.6 percent of patients had some type of malnutrition, of which 54.4 percent were mild, highlighting that 71.3 percent of cases were mixed malnutrition (Fig 3). No relationship was found between the weight loss and the type of malnutrition (p = 0.054). However a relationship between the severity level of the disease and the type and degree of malnutrition (p = 0.005, p = 0.034) was found.

Conclusions: Patients admitted to HaD have a very high prevalence of malnutrition, mostly of mixed type, which is more severe as the severity of the disease increases.
The relationship between the degree and type of malnutrition with the severity of the disease suggests that it has been established for a long period of time.