Korean J Community Nutr.  2022 Jun;27(3):205-222. 10.5720/kjcn.2022.27.3.205.

[Republished study] Assessing Nutritional Status in Outpatients after Gastric Cancer Surgery: A Comparative Study of Five Nutritional Screening Tools

• Cho JW
• Youn J
• Choi MG
• Rha MY
• Lee JE

• KMID: 2531175
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.5720/kjcn.2022.27.3.205

Abstract

Objectives
This study examined the characteristics of patients according to nutritional status assessed by five nutritional screening tools: Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA), NUTRISCORE, Nutritional Risk Index (NRI), Prognostic Nutritional Index (PNI), and Controlling Nutritional Status (CONUT) and to compare the agreement, sensitivity, and specificity of these tools.
Methods
A total of 952 gastric cancer patients who underwent gastrectomy and chemotherapy from January 2009 to December 2012 were included. The patients were categorized into malnutrition and normal status according to five nutritional screening tools one month after surgery. The Spearman partial correlation, Cohen’s Kappa coefficient, the area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity of each two screening tools were calculated.
Results
Malnutrition was observed in 86.24% of patients based on the PG-SGA and 85.82% based on the NUTRISCORE. When NRI or CONUT were applied, the proportions of malnutrition were < 30%. Patients with malnutrition had lower intakes of energy and protein than normal patients when assessed using the PG-SGA, NUTRISCORE, or NRI. Lower levels of albumin, hemoglobin, total lymphocyte count, and total cholesterol and longer postoperative hospital stays were observed among patients with malnutrition compared to normal patients when NRI, PNI, or CONUT were applied. Relatively high agreement for NUTRISCORE relative to PG-SGA was found; the sensitivity was 90.86%, and the AUC was 0.78. When NRI, PNI, and CONUT were compared, the sensitivities were 23.72% for PNI relative to NRI, 44.53% for CONUT relative to NRI, and 90.91% for CONUT relative to PNI. The AUCs were 0.95 for NRI relative to PNI and 0.91 for CONUT relative to PNI.
Conclusions
NUTRISCORE had a high sensitivity compared to PG-SGA, and CONUT had a high sensitivity compared to PNI. NRI had a high specificity compared to PNI. This relatively high sensitivity and specificity resulted in 77.00% agreement between PNI and CONUT and 77.94% agreement between NRI and PNI. Further cohort studies will be needed to determine if the nutritional status assessed by PG-SGA, NUTRISCORE, NRI, PNI, and CONUT predicts the gastric cancer prognosis.

Keyword

gastric cancer; gastrectomy; malnutrition; nutritional screening tool; comparison