Malnutrition Incidence Among Inpatients: A Cross-Sectional Retrospective Study

Abstract

Malnutrition in hospital is a significant problem which involves clinical complication risks, lengthened hospital stay and worsening prognosis. In order to overcome this problem, it is important to identify malnutrition in patients. The aim of this study was to retrospectively research the malnutrition risk of patients at time of admission and to create awareness about the importance of malnutrition screening. This research is a cross-sectional descriptive retrospective study which screened inpatients in İstanbul Sultan Abdülhamid Han Education and Research hospital from August 2018 to January 2019. Research data and NRS-2002 scores were retrospectively gathered from patient files. Between the dates of the study, a total of 10,060 patients stayed in the hospital and of these 490 (4.9%) were identified to be malnourished. Of these patients, 0.87% developed malnutrition after admission. The clinic with highest malnutrition was the anesthesia intensive care (25.9%). There was a significant increase identified in NRS-2002 scores with age (p=0.001); as NRS-2002 scores increased the mortality rates were found to significantly increase (p=0.015). The mortality in the patient group with NRS-2002 scores of 7 was 50%. Malnutrition screening will contribute to monitoring malnourished patients from time of admission and reducing mortality rates. According to the results of our study, the malnutrition risk is higher among elderly patients and as NRS-2002 score increases mortality increases. Due to this correlation between inpatient NRS-2002 scores and mortality, it was concluded that rapid screening and close surveillance of nutritional interventions for patients with high scores are important in terms of mortality..

Keywords: malnutrition, NRS, length of stay, nutrition

DOI: 10.7176/JHMN/76-10

Publication date:June 30th 2020