In hospitals, the aim of a nutritional screening procedure is to identify malnourished individuals or those at risk of malnutrition, allowing early nutritional intervention and better allocation of resources. Different methods are presented in the literature for this purpose: Malnutrition Screening Tool, Short Nutritional Assessment Questionnaire, Nutritional Risk Index, Nutrition Risk Score, Nutritional Risk Screening, Mini Nutritional Assessment, Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool, Nutritional Screening Tool, Nutritional Screening Equation. However, the use of many of these instruments is limited by inadequate methodology employed in their derivation and / or validation, by selecting specific groups of patients, by their limited feasibility or by requiring an expert to apply it. In the absence of a reference standard to deliver the nutritional diagnosis, relevant clinical outcomes must delimitate the derivation and validation of new instruments. This paper describes the above mentioned nutritional screening instruments and presents considerations regarding their use in non-selected adult inpatients.
Nutritional assessment; Malnutrition; Nutritional epidemiology; Epidemiologic methods; Screening
