[Early detection and control of hospital malnutrition]

Abstract

Over the last 25 years, hospital malnutrition has received attention by only a part of the medical staff who have been reporting that 25-50% of the hospitalized patients had some degree of malnutrition worsening during hospital stay. The causes of such high malnutrition rates, the reliability of the detection and nutritional assessment methodology and the clinical and financial consequences are established in all these reported studies. An early nutritional intervention on individuals at high risk would provide a better prognosis, improving the mortality and morbidity rates and reducing the hospital costs. Many programs for the nutritional assessment have been developed, some of which are being used in the clinical practice; the data collection requires a direct intervention upon the patients though, not being suitable to identify the nutrition risk of all the patients on admission. We are proving a tool to screen the nutritional status of all the hospitalized patients, in order to achieve a proper and early treatment of the malnutrition in relationship with the underlying disease, the course of hospitalization and the procedures of therapy.