MINI REVIEW article
Front. Pediatr.
Sec. Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fped.2025.1592554
Exploring Nutritional Screening Tools for Hospitalized Children: A Narrative Review
Provisionally accepted
- 1Pediatrics, Gandhi Medical College Bhopal, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India
- 2Thumbay University Hospital, Ajman, United Arab Emirates
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Malnutrition is common in hospitalized children, especially in critically ill children. Routine measures like anthropometric, body composition, and nutritional assessment are basic measures for monitoring. This review discusses the adequacy of nutritional screening tools (NST) like the Subjective Global Nutritional Assessment (SGNA), the Pediatric Yorkhill Malnutrition Score (PYMS), the Screening Tool for the Assessment of Malnutrition in Paediatrics (STAMP), and the Screening Tool for Risk on Nutritional status and Growth (STRONGkids). This review includes recently published reports supporting the validation and implementation of NSTs in pediatric populations. It is observed that the nutritional status of a child during hospitalization holds great importance in recovery, and implementing screening tools shows enhanced clinical outcomes. The current tools have varying sensitivity and specificity; no single tool can be recommended for all groups of hospitalized children. A combination of tools or the adaptation of existing ones, with validation in different contexts, might be ideal. Further research is needed to develop more robust and comprehensive screening tools.
Keywords: nutrition, Nutritional assessment, Nutritional risk, Nutritional screening tools, Children, Malnutrition
Received: 12 Mar 2025; Accepted: 24 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Agrawal and SONI. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Amit Agrawal, Pediatrics, Gandhi Medical College Bhopal, Bhopal, 462030, Madhya Pradesh, India
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.