Association of nutritional status and clinical outcomes in pediatric cardiac surgery

Abstract

Objective: To find the association of the biological personal factor ‘nutritional status’ of children undergoing cardiac surgery with the following behaviors: mortality/hospital discharge, length of stay in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and time in mechanical ventilation (MV). Methods: Cross-sectional, retrospective study of 786 medical records of children under five years of age who underwent cardiac surgery. Nola J. Pender’s model was used for data analysis. The Pearson’s Chi-Square test was applied to find the association between the biological personal factor and the mortality/hospital discharge behavior. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used to assess the difference between medians of the biological personal factor and the behaviors of time in MV and ICU length of stay. Results: The association between personal biological factors (poor nutritional status, acute malnutrition and chronic malnutrition) with mortality behavior was OR 2.18 (1.42 - 3.34), p=0.003, OR 0.75 (0.46 - 1.2), p=0.24 and OR 2.7 (1.77 - 4.12), p<0.0001, respectively. The median time in days of MV use and ICU length of stay in days was, respectively, 3 (p<0.0001) and 8 (p<0.0001) for poor nutritional status, two (p=0.041) and 6.5 (p=0.006) for acute malnutrition, 3 (p<0.0001) and 8 (p<0.0001) for chronic malnutrition. Conclusion: The personal biological factors with a significant association with mortality behavior were poor nutritional status and acute malnutrition. Children with analyzed nutritional deficits had a higher median time of MV and time of ICU compared with children without nutritional deficits.