[The assessment of the nutritional status of patients in the terminal stage of liver disease who are candidates for orthotopic liver transplantation].

Orthotopic liver transplant (OLT) is nowadays an accepted procedure for the treatment of patients with end-stage liver disease. Because of the significant state of malnutrition of such patients, we decided to evaluate the nutritional condition of patients accepted by the hospital's Transplants Committee as candidates for this type of therapy, with the eventual aim of discovering the types of malnutrition in the different pathologies, and which were the most frequent. The sample studied showed a significant prevalence of malnutrition. Patients with viral hepatitis showed only visceral type malnutrition, which affected 100% of them. The ethanolic cirrhosis group presented all types of malnutrition-energy-calorific (35%), protein (24%) and visceral (53%), while the group of other liver diseases presented 15% of energy-calorific malnutrition and 85% visceral. From these results, we conclude that the sample studied has a high prevalence of malnutrition and that the importance of its detection makes it possible to reduce pre- and post-surgical morbidity and mortality rates with an appropriate nutritional support.