Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Altered nutritional status is a problem in itself that can complicate a patient’s disease. In our hospital, the assessment of nutritional status at hospital admission is protocolized and performed by the Clinical Laboratory automatically, through the CONUT system, for three years ago. Our hospital provides assistance to a population of 120,000 patients, from rural areas and with a high average age. Hospital admissions for cognitive impairment are increasing in our hospital as cognitive impairment is increasingly frequent and these patients often present problems of autonomy that complicate their nutrition and their general care.

Hypothesis: Patients with cognitive impairment who has admitted to the hospital have worse nutritional status than the rest of the patients admitted in Departament of Internal Medicine.

Matearial and methods: Nutritional status was analyzed by the CONUT method; age and sex of all patients admitted to Internal Medicine in our hospital during 2017, compared to those who presented cognitive deterioration as the main diagnosis. Descriptive statistics and contingency tables were applied and X² test.

Results: During 2017 there were 1637 hospital admissions in Internal Medicine, 52.8% men and 47.2% women. The average age was 67.57 years. 43.7% did not present risk of malnutrition; 37.9% presented a risk of moderate malnutrition and 18.4% presented a risk of severe malnutrition. In the same period of time, there were 208 admissions due to cognitive impairment, 47.8% men and 52.2% women. The average age of this group was 70.45 years. 32.9% did not present risk of malnutrition; 40.8% presented risk of moderate malnutrition and 26.3% presented risk of severe malnutrition. The general group presented some nutritional disorder in 56.3% of the income compared to 67.1% of the group with cognitive deterioration. The results of nutritional risk comparison between both groups did not show significant differences (P> 0.001).

Conclusions: Nutritional status is a condition that must be assessed in all hospital admissions. Cognitive impairments, of different etiologies, can also be severely affected by nutritional status. Although in our series it has not been possible to demonstrate significant differences between the patients of both groups, we believe that malnutrition states play an important role in the evolution of cognitive impairments, so their evaluation should be mandatory. A control of the nutritional status of these patients when they return to their home would be very useful to control the nutritional status of these patients.