Determining the ability of Subjective Global Assessment (SGA) to diagnosis risk of malnutrition in hospitalized patients

Malnutrition is still one of the most common and important problems in hospitals, and caused an increased incidence of adverse events and mortality in hospitalized patients. Since there is no standard instrument as a gold standard method for diagnosis of risk of malnutrition, the aim of this study was to evaluate the ability of each of instruments provided for study on nutritional status in diagnosing patients with malnutrition and risk of malnutrition on admission. This study is a cross-sectional study, examined nutritional status of 280 patients randomly from different parts of the hospitals within 24-72 first hours of admission via Subjective global assessment (SGA) and full nutrition assessment (FNA). In this study, the sensitivity and positive and negative predictive value of SGA compared with FNA as the gold standard were calculated. The sample group consisted of 280 patients (140 females, 140 males) with an average age of 55.384 and an average BMI (22.17). In this study, the prevalence of malnutrition depends on the type of used instrument and varies between 41.4 to 49.9%. SGA has reported prevalence to 49.9 and FNA has reported prevalence to 41.1. The prevalence of malnutrition in people over age 65 are significantly higher than people under 65 years; further sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value in SGA instrument equal to 82.75, 73.17, 68.57, 85.71, respectively. According to the present study, the prevalence of malnutrition in hospitalized patients has been extensive, and laboratory and anthropometric parameters have been compared. The ability of SGA instrument has been proper in diagnosis of the patients with malnutrition and trust on malnutrition diagnosis has been relatively proper in the patients who have been diagnosed as the people with malnutrition regarding SGA test.