Nutrition in Clinical Practice Volume XX Number X Month 201X 1 –6 © 2014 American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition

hosted at online.sagepub.com Clinical Research The presence of malnutrition in inpatients has been widely stud-ied, with findings of up to 50 % of hospitalized patients, in some cases, and also its negative effects on the evolution of the dis-ease have been described.1-3 More recently, the concept of nutri-tion deterioration (ND) in hospitalized children has been described in reference to a significant weight loss in inpatients, which can lead to negative outcomes even when it does not reach the level of acute malnutrition.4 Unfortunately, few stud-ies focus on the detection of meaningful weight loss, which we will refer to as ND, before reaching the level of hospital malnutrition.4,5 The nutrition status in children usually deteriorates afte