Elucidating the Role of Malnutrition in Acute Leukemia Patients and How it Leads to Adverse Events During Hospitalization: An Interesting Study

Abstract

Background: Malnutrition negatively impacts patients with hematologic malignancies and is considered a poor marker and indicator of prognosis. Our study explored the association between malnutrition and patients hospitalized with acute leukemia, including patients with both acute myeloid and acute lymphocytic leukemia. Methods: The National Inpatient Sample (NIS) 2019-2020 was analyzed with the use of the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) codes to identify the patients admitted with the primary diagnosis of Acute Leukemia (that included patients with both Acute Myeloid and Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia). The cohort was further classified into patients who had concurrent malnutrition and those without malnutrition. The association between several outcomes was studied after adjusting for the confounding variables through multivariate regression analysis. Results: A total of 24855 patients with the primary discharge diagnosis of acute leukemia were included in the study. Among these, 3425(13.7%) were found to have concomitant malnutrition. After adjusting for the confounding variables, patients with malnutrition were found to have significantly increased odds of mortality (OR 2.89, 95% CI: 2.11-3.94, P<0.001). Similarly, the length of stay was increased by 9.1 days, 95% CI: (7.01-11.19), P<0.001 and the total cost of hospitalization was also increased by 177994 USD, 95% CI: (122573-2334152), P<0.001 in patients who had concurrent malnutrition.