Nutrition markers in patients after heart surgery

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: The prevalence of malnutrition in hospitals is high. No nutritional screening tool is considered the gold standard for identifying nutritional risk. The aims of this study were to evaluate nutritional risk in hospitalized patients using four nutritional screening tools. SUBJECTS/METHODS: Four nutritional screening tools were evaluated: nutritional risk screening (NRS-2002), the malnutrition universal screening tool (MUST), the subjective global assessment (SGA) and the mini nutritional assessment (MNA). Patients were assessed within the first 36\u2009h after hospital admission. Date of admission, diagnosis, complications and date of discharge were collected. To compare the tools, the results were reorganized into: patients at risk and patients with a good nutritional status. The statistical analysis included the \u3c7(2)-test to assess differences between the tests and the \u3ba statistic to assess agreement between the tests. RESULTS: The study sample comprised 400 patients (159 women, 241 men), mean age 67.3 (16.1) years. The prevalence of patients at nutritional risk with the NRS-2002, MUST, SGA and MNA was 34.5, 31.5, 35.3 and 58.5%, respectively. Statistically significant differences were observed between the four nutritional screening tools (P