Prevalence of hospital malnutrition in patients using nutritional support.

Objective: To investigate the prevalence of malnutrition in hospitalized patients using nutritional support, considering it's difficult to achieve nutritional goal and great risk to increase malnutrition.

Methods: A cross-sectional study with 102 patients over 18 years in use of enteral and/or parenteral nutritional therapy and monitored by the Nutritional Therapy Committee between December 2021 and August 2022. All data were collected from electronic medical records. Patients were diagnosed with Subjective Global Assessment (SGA) and Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition (GLIM) tools by the researchers.

Results: A total of 102 patients were evaluated, with a mean age of 57.5 years (±16.7) and 63.7% were male. According to the SGA, 26.5% were classified as moderately and 44.1% as severely malnourished. According to the GLIM, 19.6% were moderately and 43.1% were severely malnourished. The two diagnoses showed a moderate agreement (0.46). When evaluating only the 26 patients with overweight or obesity, the GLIM identified one patient with malnutrition and the SGA identified six patients.

Conclusions: The SGA and the GLIM tool identified a high prevalence of malnutrition in patients using nutritional support in the hospital. The use of GLIM for diagnosis of malnutrition in hospitalized patients using nutritional support proved to be an excellent and practical tool, despite being less sensitive for patients with obesity. Subjective Global Assessment was a more sensitive tool in evaluating patients with malnutrition and using nutritional support. More studies are needed to confirm the use of lean mass reduction markers to identify the degree of malnutrition defined by GLIM in hospitalized patients.