Nutritional screening of hospitalized patients at Hospital de Especialidades Pediátricas Omar Torrijos Herrera

Abstract

Introduction: Malnutrition in hospitalized patients is a prevalent condition and is
associated with many adverse outcomes. It depends on the degree, time of evolution, weight deficit and age of the child. There is a direct relationship between nutritional deterioration and longer hospitalization time, causing an increase in the frequency of complications and increased mortality. The objective of this study is to know the nutritional risk of hospitalized patients at Hospital de Especialidades Pediátricas Omar Torrijos Herrera.
Methods and materials: Cross-sectional descriptive study with patients evaluated within 48 hours of admission. Patients were aged 1 month or older, both sexes, admitted to the medicine room at Hospital de Especialidades Pediátricas in November 2014. Nutritional risk was assessed by two nutritional screening methods: STAMP and STRONGKIDS. Nutritional status was classified through anthropometric measurements. The study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee and the signing of the informed consent was required before its inclusion in the study.
Results: We evaluated 147 patients aged 4.5 ± 4.8 years, 50.3% were infants and with a predominance of males (56%). The prevalence of malnutrition was 12.8% and for overweight-obesity was 26.6%. STAMP classified 18.3% of patients as high nutritional risk. This method showed a sensitivity of 57.8% and a specificity of 87.5%. Regarding, STRONGKIDS identified 12.2% of patients at high risk, with a sensitivity of 47.3% and specificity of 92.3%. The concordance (k) between STAMP and nutritional evaluation was 0.38 and in the case of STRONGKIDS it was 0.41.
Conclusion: The prevalence of malnutrition at the time of admission was 12.8%. STAMP and STRONG KIDS demonstrated high specificity. Nutritional risk is correlated with anthropometric measures mainly in STRONGKIDS. Further studies are required to analyze these tools and nutritional interventions derived from them.