Decreased Inpatient Mortality in Obese Patients with Abdominal Nets

Background: Neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) of the abdomen are rare tumors with an incidence of 3.56 per 100,000 in the general population. Obesity is a growing public health problem with varying effects on severity of other disease. We investigated the association between obesity and inpatient morbidity/mortality in patients with abdominal neuroendocrine tumors utilizing the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS).

Methods: We analyzed data from the NIS database to investigate the association between obesity and abdominal NETs using patient information from 22,096 patient-discharges from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2010.

Results: We demonstrate that obesity is strongly associated with decreased rates of inpatient mortality in patients with NET (OR = 0.6, multivariate P = 0.02) and that malnutrition is associated with nearly 5-fold higher odds of inpatient mortality (multivariate P < 0.0005). We did not find a statistical interaction between obesity and malnutrition; however, patients who were both malnourished and obese had a lower association with mortality risk than purely malnourished patients.

Conclusions: Our data suggests that nutritional status may be an important factor in inpatient mortality in patients with NETs with obesity being protective.