Introduction: Malnutrition is a health problem which affects a high percentage of old people since the physical and psychosocial changes common to this period of life favor it in this group. In addition, aging population has a high prevalence of chronic illnesses and acute pathologies which can affect their nutritional state negatively, leading to malnutrition related to illness.
Objective: The aim of this systematic revision was to analyze the economic costs related to malnutrition in old people and to discover whether there were differences between economic costs of pre-existing malnutrition prior to illness and malnutrition because of disease.
Method: A bibliographic search was carried out in the databases of Pubmed, Web of Science and Scopus, for the period between 2000 and 2016.
Results: A total of 1,001 articles were found and 19 were selected using inclusion criteria. Of these, eleven analyzed the costs of pre-existing malnutrition prior to illness, seven analyzed the costs of malnutrition related to illness and one, both situations.
Conclusions: In general, malnutrition increased health costs as a result of hospital admissions, greater number of readmissions and greater demand on health resources. Moreover, in the studies analyzed, pre-existing malnutrition prior to illness implied greater costs than those related to the actual illness; therefore, it would be convenient to establish selection and preventive policies on malnutrition in old people.