IS THERE AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE GLIM AND THE NRS CRITERIA IN THE NUTRITIONAL DIAGNOSIS OF HOSPITALIZED SURGICAL PATIENTS? PILOT STUDY.

Background: There is no consensus on which nutritional diagnosis methods are most relevant in the hospital clinical practice.

Objective: This study investigated the agreement between the global leadership initiative on malnutrition (GLIM) criterion and the nutritional risk screening (NRS) instrument for the nutritional diagnosis of in-patients.

Methods: Cross-sectional study with 95 hospitalized surgical patients. Clinical data, nutritional risk using the NRS and malnutrition using the GLIM criteria were evaluated. The data were analyzed using the chi-square, Mann-Whitney, McNemar and Kappa coefficient tests.

Results: There was good agreement between the two methods (Kappa=0.6067). Patients who were malnourished according to the GLIM or at nutritional risk by NRS were older (P=0.0461 by GLIM and P=0.0200 by NRS) and had a higher diagnosis rate of neoplasms (38.5%, P=0.0006 by GLIM and 32.7%, P=0.0030 by NRS). The GLIM criterion identified a lower percentage of patients with malnutrition (41.05%) in relation to the NRS regarding patients with nutritional risk (54.7%).

Conclusion: The GLIM criteria and the NRS instrument are concordant methods for diagnosing malnutrition and nutritional risk in hospitalized surgical patients respectively.