Decreased inpatient mortality in obese patients with abdominal nets

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 the severities of other diseases. We investigated the association between obesity and inpatient morbidity/mortality in patients with abdominal NETs 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 (odds ratio [OR] = 0.6, multivariate P = .02) and that malnutrition is associated with a nearly 5-fold higher risk of inpatient mortality (multivariate P<.0005). We did not find a statistical interaction between obesity and malnutrition; however, patients who were both malnourished and obese had a lower 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.