Fatores associados ao risco nutricional e desfechos clínicos em pacientes cirúrgicos não-oncológicos de um hospital universitário no nordeste brasileiro

Objective: Identify nutritional risk, associated factors andclinical outcomes in non-oncological surgical patients. Methods: A retrospective observational study was con-ducted using records available on patient charts. Data werecollected from non-oncological surgical patients 20 years ofage or older hospitalized at a university hospital in Alagoas,Brazil, between October and December 2019. The patient were classified regarding nutritional risk using the NutritionalRisk Screening-2002 tool. The exploratory variables were type,severity, and temporal classification of surgery, total hospitalstay, postoperative hospital stay and clinical outcome. Thelevel of statistical significance was set at 5% (p <0.05).Results: One hundred thirteen patients were evaluated;66.4% were women and mean age was 48.1±14.5 years.Nutritional risk was identified in 11.5% of the sample.Individuals without risk had a greater frequency of excessweight (64% versus 30.8%) (p <0.04). Older people had agreater frequency of nutritional risk compared to adults(61.54% versus 38.46%; p = 0.002). Patients with nutritionalrisk were submitted to major surgery more often (70%), fol-lowed by minor surgery (20%) and surgery of moderateseverity (10%) (p = 0.007). The classification of risk deter-mined a longer postoperative hospital stay, with an averageof three additional days (p = 0.022). Death occurred in 15.4%of the individuals at nutritional risk (p = 0.035).Conclusions: Nutritional risk was associated with bodymass index, age, severity of surgery and postoperative hospi-tal stay. Regarding clinical outcomes, death was more fre-quent among patients classified with nutritional risk.