Research Information System
Ege Tıp Dergisi, vol.58, pp.272-279, 2019 (Other Refereed National Journals)
Aim: There is no gold standard to identify nutritional risk (NR) at the hospitals for geriatric population. Mini Nutritional Assessment-Short Form (MNA-SF) is widely used at hospitals where body mass index (BMI) measurements are not applicable for most of patients. Thus, revised MNA-SF (rMNA-SF) including calf circumference (CC) instead of BMI may be an alternative. There are a few studies investigating efficacy of rMNA-SF in this group. The aim of this study was to evaluate nutritional status (NS) in hospitalized elderly patients with MNA-SF and revised form, NR Screening–2002 (NRS-2002), and Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (MUST), and to compare the results.
Materials and Methods: Elderly patients hospitalized in Internal Medicine Department were enrolled in the study retrospectively assessing NS. with four nutritional screening tools (NST). from hospital records.
Results: A hundred patients (≥65 years) were enrolled in the study. Any NR varied greatly, ranging from 18.4% to 86%. When malnutrition and risk of malnutrition were evaluated together, NSTs showing the highest frequency of NR to the lowest were rMNA-SF, MNA-SF, NRS-2002, and MUST, respectively. While there was strong agreement between MNA-SF and rMNA-SF (κ = 0.861, P < 0.001), agreements between MUST and both NRS-2002 (κ = 0.509, P <0.001) and rMNA-SF (κ = 0.322, P = 0.003) were moderate-poor.
Conclusions: Nutritional risk was variable depending on the NST, and rMNA-SF may be a practical alternative for bedridden elderly patients and/or when BMI measurements are lacking at hospital. It should be kept in mind that NR might be overestimated.