Screening for malnutrition with malnutrition inflammation score and geriatric nutritional risk index in hemodialysis patients.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

Screening malnutrition, which is the most common complication in hemodialysis patients, is extremely important for these patients. Malnutrition inflammation score (MIS) and geriatric nutritional risk index (GNRI) are malnutrition screening tests used in hemodialysis patients in recent years. The purposes of this study are to evaluate the nutritional status of hemodialysis patients with different screening tests and to determine the cutoff values for this disease-specific MIS and GNRI.

METHODS

The study was conducted with 194 adult patients including 98 males and 96 females whose mean age was 53.1 ± 10.96. Subjective global assessment (SGA) and MIS tests were applied, and the GNRI value was calculated for screening malnutrition. MIS and GNRI cutoff values were obtained by adopting the SGA scores as a standard and drawing a receiver operating characteristic curve. The tatistical Package for the Social Sciences-22.0 package program was used in the analysis.

RESULTS

According to SGA, 70.7% of the patients were nourished, 21.1% were mildly-moderately malnourished, and 8.2% were found to be severely malnourished. The optimal cutoff value predicted for malnutrition was 6.5 points (94.7% sensitivity and 98.5% specificity) for MIS and 86.0 points (64.9% sensitivity and 62.8% specificity) for GNRI. Based on these cutoff values, 28.9% of the patients were determined to be malnourished according to MIS and 45.4% according to GNRI.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, screening tests are very important in the early identification of malnutrition in hemodialysis patients. This study was conducted to evaluate the malnutrition of hemodialysis patients with different screening tests. At the end of the study, the availability of MIS was found to be high in detecting malnutrition in hemodialysis patients because of its high accuracy and sensitivity of MIS. The cutoff points we identified for both MIS and GNRI are thought to facilitate the determination of malnutrition.