key: cord-0958377-cq7jfk0s
authors: Recinella, Guerino; Marasco, Giovanni; Di Battista, Antonia; Bianchi, Giampaolo; Zoli, Marco
title: Prognostic role of nutritional status in elderly patients hospitalized for COVID-19
date: 2020-06-20
journal: Med Hypotheses
DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2020.110016
sha: aea4bfd9c190aca86207f6c20ec8d51268fe2ec5
doc_id: 958377
cord_uid: cq7jfk0s

nan

We read with great interest the article by Lidoriki et al. [1] about nutritional and functional status as a prognostic factors in elderly patients with novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

The authors, mentioning previous studies [2, 3] , propose a prognostic association between nutritional and functional status of patients and prognosis after COVID-19 infection.

We want to share our preliminary data which seem to confirm this hypothesis which we believe strongly.

A prospective study assessing prognostic factors in the elderly with COVID-19 is ongoing in our Center. To date, we consecutively enrolled 37 patients aged ≥ 65 years admitted to the Geriatric ward with COVID-19 diagnosis. The median age was 82 years (IQR 74.5-93.5). Demographics, laboratory exams, past medical history and the clinical findings were collected. We compared these characteristics between the group of patients experiencing or not in-hospital death (Table 1) .

In our population, 11 (29.7%) patients underwent in-hospital death. We found a significantly lower Body Mass Index (BMI) in the in-hospital death group (p = 0.036), probably due to a worsened "nutritional status" of that group.

A prognostic role of nutritional parameters in COVID-19 elderly patients may also be suggested by lower median value of albumin in the "in-hospital death" group, although this difference was not statistically significant in our interim analysis, maybe due to the sample size.

Thus, according to our preliminary results, we support the hypothesis of Lidoriki et al. [1] about the prognostic role of nutritional status in elderly patients with the diagnosis of COVID-19.

In our opinion, a wide assessment of the nutritional status should be taken into account for setting correct management of elderly COVID-19 patients.

Future larger studies, on hospitalized elderly patients with COVID-19 should assess the nutritional status of patients in order to understand the real impact of this risk factor on disease-related mortality in the short term.

The study was conducted according to the declaration of Helsinki's ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. The protocol was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of the S. Orsola-Malpighi Hospital. Patient informed consent was obtained for each patient.

The authors received no specific funding for this work. 

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.