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Introduction: Introduction: worldwide, hospital malnutrition constitutes an important issue of morbidity and mortality. Although the prevalence of malnutrition has been calculated as between 7% and 27% in hospitalized patients, its real prevalence remains unknown or underestimated because of the different criteria for its identification and diagnosis. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of nutritional risk in a cohort of hospitalized patients and to identify the significance of the predictors associated with nutritional risk. Methods: the evaluation of the presence of nutritional risk was carried out in 247 individuals hospitalized at the second-level care institution Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales para los Trabajadores del Estado (ISSSTE) Zacatecas, Hospital General Nº 26, in Mexico. Nutritional screening was evaluated during the first 24 hours of stay with the NRS 2002. The weighing of associated variables with nutritional risk was calculated statistically using the software Sigma Plot v11. Results: forty-two percent of patients were at risk of malnutrition. Significant associations between nutritional risk and a reduction in food ingestion (during the last week), the illness severity of the patient, as well as age and sex (p < 0.05), were observed. A reduction in food ingestion during the previous week increased the likelihood of having nutritional risk 6.67 times more (95% CI: 3.4-13.2; p < 0.001) in the studied population. Conclusion: the risk of malnutrition in hospitalized patients at ISSSTE-Zacatecas, Hospital General Nº 26 is frequent (42%). Therefore, early detection of nutritional risk is important to offer for proper nutritional intervention with the objective of decreasing the associated morbidity and mortality.