[An intercenter study of the validity of nutritional evaluation]

Malnutrition is one of the most frequent consequences of neoplastic disease. During specific therapies, in order to improve the quality of life of cancer patients, it is necessary to correct their bad nutritional status, allowing thus a better quality of response to the treatment and a better survival. Therefore, it may be needful to realize repetitive nutritional evaluations. The authors have tested the validity of a nutritional assessment in patients with head and neck cancer undergoing radiotherapy, and known to have a progressive impairment of pre-existent nutritional alterations during this therapy. Results show the interest of ponderal curve and serum prealbumin level monitoring, associated with a quantified evaluation of alimentary practice of the patients ("Nutritional Status Index") during cancer therapy. Those investigations are cheap and easy to realize, and could be done often and regularly, giving thus essential data for nutritional status evaluation; the consequence is the possibility of improving the correction of malnutrition.