Nutritional status of patients hospitalized in the intensive care unit: A comprehensive report from Iranian hospitals, 2018.

INTRODUCTION AND AIM: Malnutrition is a complication of hospitalization in critically ill patients. This event is occurred because of disease and therapeutic processes for curing the patients. Determination of nutritional status helps physicians and clinical nutritionists decide on the best regimen which should be prescribed for a patient. In the current study, we aimed to report the nutritional status ofpatientshospitalizedin the intensive care unit (ICU).

METHOD OF STUDY: We used three standard tolls, including Subjective global assessment (SGA), Nutrition Risk in the Critically Ill (NUTRIC) Score and nutrition risk screening (NRS) questionnaires via a multi-stage sampling for different ICU wards of 32 university hospitals in Iran. Frequencies and rates of nutritional scores, comparative studies, and determined agreement of scoring systems and nutritional status in any ward of hospitals were evaluated.

RESULTS

There were 771 males and 540 female Cancer and trauma patients had the best and worst nutritional scores, respectively. Using NRS and NUTRIC, the low-risk scores were more frequent than thehigh-riskscores among ICU patients. SGA showed that most patients were in grades A (well nutritional status) or B (moderate nutritional status), andfew caseswere in grade C (poor nutritional status).The high-risk nutritional score wasobtained for older patients. NUTRIC and NRS had better agreement for diagnosis and differentiation of malnutrition than NUTRIC-SGA or NRS-SGA pairs. However, there was no strong agreement between the mentioned pairs.

CONCLUSION

Nutritional status of patients hospitalized in ICU wards in Iran wassomewhat better than other countries that this could be due to the highly observed guidelines of patient's care in Iran. Anyway,it is suggested that a more precise tool of nutritional scoresto be validated for patients hospitalized in ICU·In addition, better medical care needs a well evaluation of nutritional insufficiencies and what is necessary for compensation using complementary regimens.