Evaluation of efficacy of Nutritional screening tools to assess Malnutrition among Elderly patients in a tertiary hospital in Telangana, India

Abstract

Background: Malnutrition among elderly population is very common and often studied less. Aims and objectives: The present article studies the malnutrition risk among elderly patients using various nutritional assessment tools and to find which is more efficient in identifying the patient at risk. Materials and Methods: Different tools used were Malnutrition Universal screening tool (MUST), Mini-Nutritional Assessment (MNA), Nutritional Risk Screening (NRS) 2002, and Geriatric Nutritional Risk Index (GNRI) on eighty elderly patients for 6 months. Results: It was observed from the study that among the four nutritional screening tools the sensitivity and specificity were in the order of NRS > MNA > GNRI > MUST, i.e., highest validity with NRS (93.88% and 96.77%) and the least with MUST tool (38.78% and 9.68% specificity). In contrast, the results were different when it comes to the reliability of the tools where MNA > MUST > GNRI > NRS. The prevalence of malnutrition among the patients with these screening tools varied ranging from 58.75% (GNRI) to 80% (MNA). Conclusion: Thus, it was difficult to judge one particular screening tool as a standard to detect malnutrition among elderly patients. Hence, it can be concluded that all nutrition screening tools should be selected and used depending on the ease of convenience.