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

BACKGROUND: 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.

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

METHODS: 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).

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