Nutritional assessment in surgical oncology patients: a comparative analysis between methods.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

The malnutrition found in oncology patients is the main responsible for the increase in morbimortality and worsening of their quality of life. Currently, the assessment of malnutrition is performed by subjective and objective methods, or the combination of them. Although these methods are routinely applied and their association is very common in clinical practice, there are few studies on the agreement between them. Thereby, this study aims to compare different methods for nutritional status assessment in surgical oncology patients.

METHODS

173 oncology patients, admitted for surgery, were submitted to an anthropometric evaluation and answered a SGA, PG-SGA and NRS-2002. Kappa test was used to evaluated the level of concordance between the methods.

RESULTS

Poor concordance were observed between BMI and NRS-2002 (K=0,286), SGA (K=0,372) and PGSGA (K=0,173). Among the subjective methods, the best results were found for SGA and PG-SGA (K=0,690), and the lowest between NRS-2002 and both others (SGA: K=0,345; PG-SGA: K=0,322).

CONCLUSIONS

The poor concordance found between objective and subjective methods reinforces the importance of associating indicators in the nutritional assessment of this population Despite of the poor concordance found between the nutritional status assessment methods investigated in this study, patients who had greater depletion of body stores were also diagnosed with a higher degree of malnutrition by subjective methods.