Endocrine Abstracts

Nutritional status has an important effect on the progression of any disease, not only in hospitalized patients, even more in ambulatory patient of primary care. Although there are many systems of evaluating nutritional status, they are costly and subject to variability amongst individuals. The Medicine Laboratory can correctly perform a nutritional evaluation in a quick an efficient manner.

Objective: Analyze the nutritional status by CONUT nutritional evaluation method performed by the Medicine Laboratory in ambulatory patients of primary care our Health Management Area in 2016.

Materials and methods: The CONUT method for nutritional evaluation was used. This method is based on determining undernutrition according to levels of total lymphocyte count total cholesterol and serum albumin. During the study, the results of rutinary blood tests were used, not additional bllod tests were performed. The focus was a sample size of all patient admitted in primary care centers, n=1454 patients. Statistics data: accepted error 3.5%, C.I. 99%. The frequency of nutritional risk was calculated analysed alongside data on patients’ sex, age.

Results: 1454 patients were studied, 68.5%were not undernourished, 27,4% were mild undernourished and 4,1% were moderate or severe undernourished. The mean age of patients was 57.9 years, 60.9% were women and 39.1% were men. 6.7% of men were moderate or severely undernourished, only 2.3% of women studied were moderate or severely undernourished. The statistics differences by gender were significatives.

Conclusion: The nutritional evaluation performed by the Medicine Laboratory is an effective tool to evaluate nutritional status and take corrective measures. Although there are many experiences in CONUT nutritional evaluation in hospitalized patients, we think that this method is useful in primary care too.