Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is a prevalent pathology. It has been noticed that patients tend to have longer stays in the hospital and one of the factors that causes it corresponds to bad metabolic control.

AIM:

To assess prevalence and different variables related to an erroneous metabolic control and a longer hospital stay.

PATIENTS AND METHODS:

It is a cross-sectional study on diabetics patients hospitalized at the Internal Medicine service in the Hospital of city of Quilpué, for a period of two months, quantifying epidemiologic data, days of hospital stay and metabolic control. A statistical multivariate correlative study was carried.

RESULTS:

Patient prevalence with DM was 13.15% (n = 35/266), all of them were type 2 (DM), being the 91.4% (n = 32) hypertensive, 97.1% (n = 34) older than 40 years old, 62.9% (n = 22) with HbA1c ≥ 7%, 17,1% (n = 6) had a bad metabolic control and an average of 22,8 (rank = 6-136) days of hospital stay versus 12,1 days without DM. An association was observed between inadequate previous metabolic control and “bad metabolic hospital control” (p < 0.05).

DISCUSSION:

Prevalence of DM patients in the hospital was lower than other centers of the region. A statistical association between bad metabolic chronic control with bad metabolic hospital control was found. No associations between bad hospital control and long stays were observed, a possible reason might be the biased values of glycemia’s records and different handling of these patients.