Nutrition screening in public hospital emergency rooms: Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool and Nutritional Risk Screening-2002 can be applied

Abstract

To evaluate the agreement between two nutritional screening tools (Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool [MUST] and Nutritional Risk Screening-2002 [NRS-2002]) and Subjective Global Assessment (SGA) to identify nutritional risk in patients admitted to public emergency rooms. Cross-sectional study. Patients aged ≥18 years who were admitted to an emergency room of a tertiary public hospital were evaluated. A nutritional risk assessment was performed in the first 48h following hospital admission, through MUST, NRS-2002, and SGA. The Cohen's kappa coefficient was calculated. The study included 577 patients, with an average age of 53.9±15.8 years; 56% of whom were women. Prevalence of nutritional risk was 35.3% and 28.5% according to MUST and NRS-2002, respectively, and malnutrition prevalence was equal to 32.9% according to SGA. The Cohen's kappa coefficient between SGA and MUST was 0.67 and between SGA and NRS-2002 was 0.62. MUST and NRS-2002 showed good agreement with SGA in identification of nutritional risk, suggesting that both tools have similar applicability for nutritional screening in adults or older patients admitted to public emergency rooms.