Validity of the Translated Turkish Version of the Tool for Nutrition Risk Screening for Paediatric Cancer

Malnutrition in paediatric cancer patients increases adverse clinical outcomes; however, methods for assessing malnutrition risk remain unclear. This study aimed to assess the validity of the Nutrition Risk Screening for Pediatric Cancer (NRS-PC).

This cross-sectional study was conducted in the paediatric oncology unit of a tertiary care university hospital. The nutritional risk and malnutrition status were assessed by the Nutrition Screening Tool for Childhood Cancer (SCAN) and Pediatric Subjective Global Nutritional Assessment (SGNA), respectively. Receiver-operator characteristic (ROC) curve method was used to evaluate the validity of NRS-PC. Sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values were calculated.

The median age of children was 8 years, and 60.2% were boys. The prevalence of malnutrition was 48.4%. NRS-PC had excellent accuracy compared with SCAN (AUC: 0.87, 95% CI: 0.827-0.944; p < 0.001) and SGNA (AUC: 0.90, 95% CI: 0.847-0.951; p < 0.001). Using SGNA as a reference method, the NRS-PC tool had a sensitivity of 77.4%-100% and specificity of 24.2%-86.4% according to different cut-off points.

The Turkish version of the NRS-PC is a simple, valid and practical method for nutritional risk screening in the paediatric oncology population. Further feasibility and acceptability studies are needed to determine the most appropriate screening tools in children.