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Background & aims: Intensive nutritional therapy is an essential component of burn care. Regardingpost-minor burn injuries, the literature is lacking. The aim of this study was to evaluate documentednutritional therapy in relation to international guidelines after both minor and major burn injuries. The secondary aim of this study was to evaluate the adequacy of energy and protein intake compared toindividual nutritional goals post-burn injury.

Methods: A retrospective observational single-centre study including patients admitted between 2017and 2019 at a burn centre in Sweden was performed. The patients included in the study were >18 years old and in need of hospital care for > 72 h post-burn injury. Information about patients' demographics,nutritional therapy, and clinical characteristics of burn injury was collected. The patients were dividedaccording to total body surface area burnt (TBSA %) into minor burn injuries (TBSA <20%) and major burninjuries (TBSA >20%). Descriptive statistics were used to analyse data. Adherence to guidelines wasestablished by comparing 24 nutritional therapy recommendations to documented treatment. If documented nutritional treatment were in accordance with guidelines, adherence was considered high(>80%), moderate (60-79.9%) or low (<59.9%).

Results: One hundred thirty-four patients were included, 90 patients with minor burn injuries and 44patients with major burn injuries. Documented adherence to the nutritional guideline was overall low.After minor burn injury, 8% (2/24) of nutritional therapy recommendations had a high adherence (fatintake <35% of total energy intake and enteral nutrition as prioritized feeding route), 17% (4/24) amoderate adherence, and 75% (18/24) a low adherence. In patients treated after a major burn injury,there were two recommendations with documented high adherence (Vitamin C and Zinc); 25% (6/24)had moderate adherence, and 67% (16/24) had low adherence. In addition, quite a large amount ofmissing data was found.Adequacy of documented nutritional intake, compared to the individual documented goal, was 78%(±23%) for energy and 66% (±22%) for protein after minor burn injury. After major burn injury, the adequacy was 89% (±21%) for energy and 78% (±19%) for protein, respectively.

Conclusions: This study revealed low adherence to nutritional guidelines in patients treated for minorand major burn injuries. Compared to major burn injuries, lower documented adequacy for both energyand proteins was found in minor burn injuries. Given the disparity between guidelines and documentednutritional therapy, and the lack of specific guidelines for minor burn injuries, there could be aconsiderable risk of inadequate nutritional therapy post-burn injury.