Assessment of nutritional status of patients candidates for lung resection by 2 methods

Abstract

It is important to determine the nutritional status of an individual that may be submitted to a surgical intervention since it has been shown a relationship between nutritional status impairments and the incidence of complications. We present the data from a study comparing two nutritional assessment methods. To study the rate of hyponutrition in patients candidates to lung resection in southern Galicia, and to determine if there were significant differences in the use of 2 different nutritional assessment methods. 200 patients participated in this study: 144 males (aged 29-83 years) and 56 females (aged 20-80 years). All of them were assessed for their nutritional status according to Chang's method and we also performed a patient-generated global subjective assessment (PG-GSA) according to the SENBA working group protocol. There is agreement between the 2 methods in assessing 122 patients as having "good nutritional status". There are two cases with agreement between both methods in the diagnosis of "moderate hyponutrition or risk for hyponutrition". No case of "severe hyponutrition" is diagnosed by the Chang's method. We found statistically significant differences between the observations obtained with the two methods. The Chang's method performed more accurately than the PG-GSA, so that we believe it should be the first choice method for the preoperative nutritional assessment of patients candidate to a lung resection.