Nutrition
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We assessed admission screening information that best identifies patients who are at risk for malnutrition-related complications (MRCs). ⋯ The ability of admission information to accurately reflect MRC risk is crucial to early initiation of restorative medical nutritional therapy. There is currently no uniform or proved standard for identifying MRC risk within 24 h of acute care admission. The ideal nutritional screen correlates well with the occurrence of MRC and also uses data routinely obtained at admission. The models described can be uniformly used by hospitals to screen patients for MRC risk.
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Subjective Global Assessment (SGA) is a widely used and validated method for identifying and classifying malnutrition. Recently, in effort to assess nutritional status more accurately, quantitative systems have been devised in which scores are assigned for items or components of the SGA. In addition to validation of conventional SGA in our patient population, this prospective study investigated the association of a recently devised quantitative SGA (Q-SGA) method and an invented modified Q-SGA (MQ-SGA) scoring system with conventional SGA. ⋯ The findings suggest that MQ-SGA outperforms Q-SGA in identifying malnutrition according to SGA. Future nutrition scoring studies need to take into account the weighted effects of items on outcome.