• José Pablo Suárez-Llanos, Laura Vallejo-Torres, Miguel Ángel García-Bello, Carolina Hernández-Carballo, Eduardo Mauricio Calderón-Ledezma, Adriá Rosat-Rodrigo, Irina Delgado-Brito, Francisca Pereyra-García-Castro, Nestor Benitez-Brito, Nieves Felipe-Pérez, Yolanda Ramallo-Fariña, and Juan Carlos Romero-Pérez.
• Endocrinology and Nutrition Department, University Hospital Nuestra Señora de Candelaria, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain.
• Arch Med Sci. 2020 Jan 1; 16 (2): 273281273-281.

IntroductionHospital malnutrition is very common and worsens the clinical course of patients while increasing costs. Lacking clinical-economic studies on the implementation of nutrition screening encouraged the evaluation of the CIPA (Control of Food Intake, Protein, Anthropometry) tool.Material And MethodsAn open, non-randomized, controlled clinical trial was conducted on patients admitted to internal medicine and general and digestive surgery wards, who were either assigned to a control (standard hospital clinical care) or to an intervention, CIPA-performing ward (412 and 411, respectively; n = 823). Length of stay, mortality, readmission, in-hospital complications, and quality of life were evaluated. Cost-effectiveness was analysed in terms of cost per quality-adjusted life years (QALYs).ResultsThe mean length of stay was higher in the CIPA group, though not significantly (+ 0.95 days; p = 0.230). On the surgical ward, more patients from the control group moved to critical care units (p = 0.014); the other clinical variables did not vary. Quality of life at discharge was similar (p = 0.53), although slightly higher in the CIPA group at 3 months (p = 0.089). Patients under CIPA screening had a higher mean cost of € 691.6 and a mean QALY gain over a 3-month period of 0.0042. While the cost per QALY for the internal medicine patients was € 642 282, the results for surgical patients suggest that the screening tool is both less costly and more effective.ConclusionsThe CIPA nutrition screening tool is likely to be cost-effective in surgical but not in internal medicine patients.Copyright: © 2019 Termedia & Banach.

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