Malnutrition is common in patients with gastrointestinal cancer. The first step in the diagnosis of malnutrition is to evaluate the malnutrition risk by validated screening tools according to the Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition (GLIM). This study aimed to determine the best nutritional screening tool for identifying GLIM malnutrition and validate the performance of these tools in different age subgroups.
We did a prospective cohort study of patients who were diagnosed with gastrointestinal cancer from February 2016 to November 2019. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive values (PPV), negative predictive values (NPV), and area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) of three screening tools (Nutritional risk screening 2002 (NRS 2002), Geriatric Nutritional Risk Index (GNRI), MNA-SF) were calculated.
A total of 488 patients were enrolled, and 138 patients (28.27%) were malnutrition according to the GLIM criteria. The consistency of NRS 2002, GNRI, and MNA-SF with GLIM-defined malnutrition was 74.8, 72.1, and 71.1%, respectively. In the subgroup analysis of young patients (<65 years), NRS 2002 exhibited the best discrimination with the AUC of 0.724 (95% CI, 0.567–0.882), the sensitivity of 64.3% (95% CI, 35.6–86.0), and the specificity of 80.6% (95% CI, 69.2–88.6). In patients older than 65 years, MNA-SF exhibited the best discrimination with the AUC of 0.764 (95% CI, 0.714–0.814), the sensitivity of 82.3% (95% CI, 74.1–88.3), and the specificity of 70.5% (95% CI, 64.7–75.7).
Nutritional risk screening 2002 (NRS 2002) is the best malnutrition screening tool in gastrointestinal cancer patients younger than 65 years, and MNA-SF is the best malnutrition screening tool in patients older than 65 years. It is necessary to select targeted nutritional screening tools according to the difference in age.