Introduction:

The nutritional status of the patient is a good diagnostic indicator, which must be evaluated from the moment the patient is admitted to hospital. Objective: To associate the nutritional status and the pathology of patients admitted to the hospitalization of a high specialty hospital in Mexico.

Material and methods:

Analytical cross-sectional study, in which 2,918 records of adult patients admitted to a tertiary care hospital in Mexico City between 2016 and 2017 were reviewed. The variables used were main pathology that determined the hospitalization, sex, age and BMI to classify nutritional status. In the statistical analysis, the Pearson Chi-square test was used to associate the pathology and sex variables, and the linear trend X 2 test was used to associate the nutritional status variables by BMI and pathology.

Results:

The most frequent disease was oncological (20.5%). A high frequency of overweight and obesity was observed in all the included pathologies, oscillating above 45%, and the pathology with the highest was surgical (53.9%).

Conclusions:

It is essential that all health institutions identify the nutritional status of recently hospitalized patients, to implement more preventive and control measures in patients who leave the hospital.