Introduction:

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a contemporary medical problem characterized by insufficient data on prevalence and weak modelling methodology.

Objective:

To establish nutritional status and neurological-functional condition interrelationships with clinical signs: time and type of injury, level of injury and severity of dorsal lumbar spinal cord injury.

Material and Methods:

A cross-sectional descriptive study of 102 patients with spinal cord trauma on admission (85 men and 17 women) was conducted from February 2016 to January 2020, in CIREN, Havana, Cuba. Nutritional and neurological assessment (level, degree and severity of injury) was performed using ASIA scales, SCIM-III Independence, and Barthel index. Means, standard deviation, standard error and analysis of variance for normal distributions were obtained. SPSS version 26 was used.

Results:

The mean age was 29.7 ± 8.1 years. The age of trauma was 3.1 ± 1.4 years. Spinal cord injury occurred in 50.6 % of the T7- L3 segment in patients with complete injury. There was chronic energy deficiency (4.9 %), according to Body Mass Index; 50.6 % were ≥22 kg/m2, according to Nash risk criteria. In addition, 73.5 % were classified on the ASIA A scale. The correlation between Catz and Barthel showed a significant association (p< 0.01). The decrease in muscle mass, arm muscle area, reflectivity and sensitivity were significant according to age, type, level and severity of injury (p< 0.05). Methodological weakness of estimates for skeletal muscle mass is discussed.

Conclusions:

Time of injury, muscle tone and neurological level of spinal cord injury are characterized as interactive determinants of the diagnosis.

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