Capacity of the thickness of the adductor pollicis muscle in predicting the nutritional risk of hospitalized patients

Abstract

Malnutrition is commonly observed in the hospital setting and is associated with increased morbidity and mortality, length of hospital stay and hospital costs, and worsening of response to treatment. Identifying the presence of nutritional risk or malnutrition in hospitalized patients is essential so that individualized nutritional therapy can be instituted early. One of the main methods of evaluation of nutritional status is Subjective Global Assessment (SGA), and associated with it, anthropometric measures complement the evaluation. The thickness of the adductor pollicis muscle (TAPM) is a measure that can evaluate the muscle compartment and indicate changes in body composition in a simple, practical and noninvasive way. This study presents the main studies that used the TAPM measure with the objective of identifying the capacity to detect hospital malnutrition when compared to the classic nutritional status assessment instruments. The results showed that TAPM is a promising and reliable, easy-to-perform, low-cost measure with the potential to identify malnutrition and nutritional risk in hospitalized patients, in order to accelerate and facilitate the nutritional diagnosis of these patients, as well as to detect protein depletion. However, new studies must be performed to identify the reasons for different findings in the literature, especially regarding the cutoff point for this population, taking into account the age range and gender. Keywords: malnutrition; nutrition assessment; adductor pollicis muscle; anthropometry; hospitalized patients