Analysis of nutritional risk tools to identify essential parameters in assessing nutritional risk in elderly patients

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The nutrition screening tool determines whether or not a patient is at risk of malnutrition. Many organizations contributed to the form’s design by researching various nutritional screening tools. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to analyse the different screening forms for the hospitalised geriatric patients to understand the nutritional status as well as the comorbidities. In addition, the study intends to identify the essential parameters from three nutrition screening forms-MUST,NRS-2002,MNA. The primary outcome is to identify the essential parameters from the screening form and calculating the nutrition risk score is considered a secondary outcome. METHODS: The research was done on geriatric patients who were admitted to the hospital from November 2019 to March 2020, suffering from comorbidities. The study comprises 192 hospitalized patients with an average age of 74 years including both genders. The patients’ data was collected by a certified dietician to understand the essential parameters of these nutrition screening forms. The Pearson correlation test is used to find the correlation value between the screening form parameters. Based on the analysis, features with a correlation value greater than 0.5 with the nutrition score are considered a significant parameter for the research. RESULTS: The analysis of the nutrition screening strategy demonstrates the different significant parameters of the above three screening forms. The experimentation shows, the significant parameters are the Body Mass Index, impaired nutrition status, the severity of disease, mobility, mode of feeding, nutritional status, and weight loss score. CONCLUSIONS: The research is performed to understand the correlation between the screening form parameters MNA, MUST, NRS2002 using a non-invasive method and analyze the score in patients to improve health rates by using nutritional risk therapy and nutritional care for such patients. Nutrition therapy can be applied to patients suffering from malnutrition and at risk of malnutrition to improve the health of the patient.