Introduction: Malnutrition is a widespread condition that impacts millions of people across the world annually. The World Health Organization defines malnutrition as the deficiency, excess or imbalance in a person’s intake of energy and/or nutrients. It has been highly prevalent in hospitalized patients and is often overlooked as it continues to be an unrecognized problem. It is also associated with increased risk of complications, higher mortality rate, longer hospital stay, and higher hospitalization costs. The researchers aim to determine in-patients’ nutritional status using the Subjective Global Assessment (SGA) and their outcomes in a tertiary hospital.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in a tertiary hospital in Cebu city for three months. A total of 453 patients were selected through simple random sampling from those assessed to be at risk for malnutrition. The nutritional status was obtained using the SGA tool and correlated with the demographic, nutritional and clinical profiles.

Results: In the study, the mean age was 54 years with a female predominance (54.1%). A larger percentage belonged to the obese 1 category (34.9%). Fifty-eight percent had moderate risk for malnutrition and 57.2% had an SGA grade of B which corresponded to moderate malnutrition. The most common reason of admission was due to respiratory causes (25%) and the leading comorbidities were hypertension (48.79%), diabetes mellitus (36.42%) and chronic kidney disease (10.38%). The mean number of hospital stay was 6.8 days (98.9%) were discharged improved with a mortality rate of only one percent. The following factors had a positive relationship with the SGA grade: those in the older age group (p=0.000), those with more comorbidities (p=0.000), patients with diabetes (p=0.027) and chronic kidney diseases (0.001), those with higher nutritional risk on screening (p=0.000), those with pulmonologic (p=0.035) and oncologic cases (p=0.012) upon admission. The study results showed that the higher the SGA grade, the longer hospital stay (p=0.000).

Conclusion: In this study, the prevalence of malnutrition was 86% wherein 57.2% of the study population had moderate malnutrition, 28.9% had severe malnutrition and 13.9% had no malnutrition. The degree of malnutrition was associated with longer hospital stay, but not with mortality.

Keywords: malnutrition, subjective global assessment, nutritional status

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