Validity, efficacy and reliability of 3 nutritional screening tools regarding the nutritional assessment in different social and health areas

Abstract

Introduction and objective: Nutritional screening allows for the detection of nutritional risk. Validated tools should be implemented, and their usefulness should be contrasted with a gold standard. The aim of this study is to discover the validity, efficacy and reliability of 3 nutritional screening tools in relation to complete nutritional assessment.

Material and methodology: A sub-analysis of a cross-sectional and descriptive study on the prevalence of disease-related malnutrition. The sample was selected from outpatients, hospitalized and institutionalized patients. MUST, MNAsf and MST screening were employed. A nutritional assessment of all the patients was undertaken. The SENPE-SEDOM consensus was used for the diagnosis.

Results: In the outpatients, both MUST and MNAsf have a similar validity in relation to the nutritional assessment (AUC 0.871 and 0.883, respectively). In the institutionalized patients, the MUST screening method is the one that shows the greatest validity (AUC 0.815), whereas in the hospitalized patients, the most valid methods are both MUST and MST (AUC 0.868 and 0.853, respectively).

Conclusions: It is essential to use nutritional screening to invest the available resources wisely. Based on our results, MUST is the most suitable screening method in hospitalized and institutionalized patients.

Keywords: Cribado nutricional; Desnutrición establecida; Established malnutrition; Fiabilidad; Nutritional assessment; Nutritional risk; Nutritional screening; Reliability; Riesgo nutricional; Validez; Validity; Valoración nutricional.