Nutritional deficiency in general practice: a systematic review.

Objective: Nutritional deficiency is an independent risk factor for mortality. Despite its clinical relevance, the prevalence in a primary care setting is poorly documented. We performed a systematic review of reported prevalence and clinical assessment of nutritional deficiency in general practice.

Methods: From MEDLINE, Current Contents and EMBASE, we derived articles and checked the initially included ones for references on prevalence data. Of the eligible articles, we assessed the quality of research and results.

Results: We finally included eight studies. The prevalence ranged from 0 to 13%. However, the study populations were heterogeneous and all studies contained methodological flaws, especially selection bias. In addition, the clinical assessment differed between studies.

Conclusion: Literature on the prevalence of nutritional deficiency within general practice is rare and provides disputable prevalence assessments.