Validity of the nutritional risk index as an indicator of malnutrition in hospitalized patients
International Journal of Development Research
Validity of the nutritional risk index as an indicator of malnutrition in hospitalized patients
Received 26th December, 2016; Received in revised form 14th January, 2017; Accepted 21st February, 2017; Published online 31st March, 2017
Copyright©2017, NutritionistAna Cristina et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Malnutrition is commonly seen in hospitals and is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Objective was to validate the use of the Nutritional Risk Index (NRI) in combination with different methods of nutritional assessment in the identification of malnutrition in hospitalized patients. Cross-sectional study. The diagnosis of malnutrition was obtained from the NRI, anthropometric variables and the Subjective Global Assessment (SGA). To evaluate the efficacy of the methods in the detection of malnutrition compared to SGA, a ROC curve was constructed and its area (AUROC) estimated. The agreement between the NRI and the SGA was verified by the kappa coefficient. We evaluated 100 patients, with a mean age of 53.20 ± 14.80 years. Malnutrition was identified in 68 patients by the SGA and 63 by the NRI. Significant correlations were observed between the NRI and most of the analyzed anthropometric variables and serum albumin. Sensitivity and positive values were 77.0% and 78.0%, respectively, with an area under the ROC curve of 0.74. The NRI was able to identify patients at nutritional risk when compared to the SGA and anthropometric variables, supporting its use as a complementary tool in the evaluation of nutritional status in hospitalized patients.
