Methods of nutritional screening in hospitalized adult patients:

a literature review

Abstract

The presence of hospital malnutrition has long been recognized as a severe problem within hospital institutions and those responsible for providing medical care, since it is associated with poor clinical results, longer hospital stays, higher mortality, morbidity, and increased hospital costs. In addition, studies have indicated that patients with in-hospital malnutrition also have a poor immune response, reduced muscle strength, difficulty in weaning from ventilator due to respiratory fatigue, altered thermoregulation, micronutrient abnormalities, cachexia, sarcopenia, frailty, and impaired wound healing.

For their part, nutritional screening methods are a very handy tool for quickly and easily identifying patients at risk of malnutrition and, thus, determining whether a more detailed evaluation is warranted and excluding those patients who are not at risk.

This article intends to make a narrative review of the main nutritional screening methods implemented in people with cancer, kidney disease and hospitalized in critical condition to assess the differences between them. For this purpose, a review of the scientific literature was carried out, consulting the PubMed database and Google Scholar. All studies published between 2010 and 2021 in English and Spanish that present an abstract, objectives, definitions, results, and conclusions on screening methods and nutritional assessment in adult hospitalized patients or cancer patients, with kidney disease, and critical were included.