Background: The goals of nutrition therapy include providing adequate growth and development, avoiding a negative energy and nitrogen balance, and preventing complications.
Objective: To evaluate the nutrition therapy received by newborns at the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of a public maternity hospital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Methods: Retrospective longitudinal observational study in which data were collected on newborns admitted to NICU, in Rio de Janeiro, in 2016. The time that elapsed before commencement of parenteral and trophic enteral nutritional, time to reach full enteral nutrition, type of diet at the beginning of trophic enteral nutrition and at discharge from the NICU, and the relationship between birth weight and nutritional therapy were evaluated.
Results: Trophic enteral nutrition began after 24.42 (SD +20.23) hours, on average, and the mean time to reach full enteral nutrition was 10.0 (SD +5.51) days. Newborns with a birth weight below 1500 g had a longer hospital stay (p = .002), longer oxygen therapy (p = .009), a longer time before commencement of enteral feeding (p = .005), and took longer to reach full enteral feeding (p = .010).
Conclusions: The institutional nutritional therapy practices were consistent with those proposed in the literature, but more support is needed for breastfeeding in this group.
Keywords: Newborns; enteral nutrition; neonatal intensive care; nutritional therapy.