Nutritional Screening Tools in the Pediatric Population: A Systematic Review

Disease-related malnutrition (DRM) is the most common type of malnutrition in industrialized countries, and it has a high associated morbidity. Despite the existence of various screening tools for its detection, there is currently no consensus in the literature on which one is the most appropriate for clinical use. The aim of this systematic review is to update the available evidence on pediatric nutritional screening tools and to compare their validity and applicability.

A systematic review of the literature was conducted using the MEDLINE (PubMed) database, selecting articles related to nutritional screening tools in the pediatric population. A quality assessment was carried out using the Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies 2 (QUADAS-2).

A total of 200 articles were identified, of which 11 were included in the review. They include a total of 9,573 patients (mean age of 6.7 years and 49% female) from different countries. Eight screening tools were found, and three of them were the most employed: the Screening Tool for Risk on Nutritional Status and Growth (STRONGkids), the Screening Tool for the Assessment of Malnutrition in Pediatric (STAMP), and the Pediatric Yorkhill Malnutrition Score (PYMS). A high level of heterogeneity was observed among the selected studies without a gold standard for comparison.

Despite the heterogeneity, the PYMS seems to have the greatest capacity to detect pediatric patients at nutritional risk and should therefore be considered when choosing a nutritional screening tool.