Background: Malnutrition remains a global health concern, affecting 22.3% of children under five with stunting and 6.8% with wasting worldwide. Among hospitalized children, prevalence is higher and may worsen during hospitalization. The Vietnam Pediatric Association recommends that nutritional risk screening be performed within 36 hours of admission. However, current practice mainly relies on anthropometric assessment, which may fail to identify at-risk patients.
Objective: To describe nutritional status using different assessment approaches and to analyze risk factors for malnutrition among hospitalized children.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among pediatric inpatients in the Departments of General Internal Medicine, Internal Medicine 1, Cardiology, Gastroenterology, and Nephrology. Nutritional status was assessed using WHO anthropometric indices combined with nutritional risk screening tools, based on clinical factors such as reduced dietary intake, weight loss, and underlying diseases.
Results: The risk of malnutrition among hospitalized pediatric patients remained significant, with 82.2% (mild: 54.0%; moderate: 18.3%; severe: 7.7%; very severe: 2.2%) of children at risk of malnutrition according to the Vietnamese Pediatric Association scale. A large proportion of patients were at risk despite not meeting anthropometric diagnostic criteria; specifically, malnutrition rates were 23.5% by BMI/T, 30.8% by CN/CC, and 40.6% by CC/T. Notably, malnutrition risk was strongly associated with underlying diseases (p < 0.05), with the highest prevalence observed in the gastrointestinal, respiratory, cardiovascular, renal, immunological, surgical, and endocrine disease groups.
Conclusions: Malnutrition and its associated risk remain important concerns in pediatric inpatients. Early nutritional risk screening using a standardized scoring tool helps identify an additional group of pediatric patients at risk of malnutrition who have not yet met anthropometric criteria for malnutrition, thereby enabling earlier identification of at-risk cases and improving clinical outcomes.