Nutritional Status of Lebanese Hospitalized Patients With Chronic Disease: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background: In a hospitalized setting, malnutrition is known to increase patient's mortality and lower the quality of life; therefore, it is essential to detect such cases and intervene at the earliest possible. The goal of this study is to estimate the rate of malnutrition in hospitalized Lebanese patients, explore its association with different factors, and create a simple tool to detect patients at high risk of malnutrition. Methods: One hundred and fifty Lebanese hospitalized patients, suffering at least from one chronic disease, were randomly chosen from Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Notre Dame de Secours (CHU-NDS) hospital. The Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) score was used to assess nutritional status. Results: A total of 34.7% of patients in our sample were at risk of malnutrition and 9.3% were malnourished. A higher risk of malnutrition was found in patients with a low body mass index, who were physically inactive or admitted to the hospital more than once in the past 6 months. The nutritional status was not associated with certain chronic diseases more than others. We designed a simple decision tree model based only on 3 questions to detect patients at high risk of malnutrition/malnourished. This tool has a sensitivity of 62% and a specificity of 77%. Conclusion: The prevalence found in our study was comparable with previous data. However, factors associated with poor nutritional status were somewhat different. Further studies are needed to validate our screening tool and to examine the effect of specific diseases on malnutrition on a larger scale.