Nutritional status assessment in patients recovered from covid-19

Abstract EN

Background: COVID-19 is a serious respiratory disease that resulted from infection with a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and has rapidly spread, causing a global pandemic with high rates of infection and mortality.

In particular, recent studies have reported how malnutrition is one of the crucial elements that may be predictive of slower recovery or no recovery at all, for the affected subjects.

The present study aims to assess the nutritional status of patients recovered from COVID-19, to describe the prevalence of under/malnutrition of these patients.

Patients and methods: This is a cross-sectional study on 275 adult patients within two weeks post-COVID-19 infection i.

e.

within 2 weeks after the end of isolation period/recovery) during the period of March 7, 2021, to May 20, 2021.

The assessment tool used was the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA).

Results: Our study included 275 patients with age 40.16 ± 13.78 years, the average family income of almost half of included patients (44.4% ) was >3400 to 6500 Egyptian pounds per month.

Post-COVID-19 symptoms were reported by 84% of the patients.

The mean BMI was 29.4±5.707 while 45.1% were obese (BIM≥ 30).

The level of the nutritional status assessed by MNA SCORE showed that 53.5% of studied populations were at risk of malnutrition with (2.31 ± 0.611) mean scores for all included patients.

In conclusion, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasis must be placed to identify undernourished patients on admission and develop an active strategy in all COVID-19 patients for care or prevention for those least affected.