Agreement between Graz Malnutrition Screening (GMS) with subjective nutritional assessment instruments in...

it is essential for an early nutritional intervention that utilizes effective and practical nutritional screening and evaluation tools to diagnose nutritional status, increasing the patient's survival.

to evaluate the agreement of the Graz Malnutrition Screening (GMS) with subjective methods of nutritional evaluation in hospitalized patients.

descriptive cross-sectional study with adults and elderly of both sexes evaluated within 48 hours of hospital admission. Nutritional status in cancer patients was identified by the Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA®) and in the elderly by the Mini Nutritional Assessment Short-Form (MNA-SF®). GMS was applied in both groups and its efficiency was compared with that of PG-SGA® and MNA-SF®. The agreement between the methods was evaluated by the kappa test, followed by assessment of diagnostic performance and correlation test. RESULTS: of the 87 patients evaluated, 64.4% (56) presented nutritional risk according to GMS, while 49.4% (43) and 47.1% (41) indicated nutritional risk and malnutrition according to MNA-SF® and PG-SGA®, respectively. GMS presented moderate agreement with PG-SGA®(p < 0.001) and MNA-SF® (p < 0.001), with high sensitivity, specificity,  positive predictive value, and negative predictive value. Correlations wereobserved between the GMS score and both the PG-SGA® (p < 0.001) and MNA-SF® scores (p < 0.001).

GMS was effective in detecting nutritional risk in hospitalized patients when compared to classic tools in the evaluation of nutritionalstatus in hospitalized patients.