Background:

malnutrition is one of the complications that appears most frequently in oncological patients and causes serious consequences such as loss of lean mass.

Objective:

to know which nutritional screening method is most useful in predicting the loss of lean mass in cancer patients.

Methods:

a descriptive study was carried out evaluating three methods of nutritional screening, Malnutrition Screening Tool (MST), Malnutrition Universal Screening (MUST) and Nutritional Risk Screening (NRS-2002), in oncological patients undergoing radiotherapy treatment. Each method was analyzed by ROC curves with AUC calculation.

Results:

loss of lean mass is present in 48.73% of the patients. Of them, 29.44% present a loss of lean mass between 0-2%; 10.66% of patients, between 2-5%; and 8.13% of patients present a loss of lean mass > 5%. The results show that when taking a loss of lean mass > 5% as a cut-off point, the MST method has a higher AUC than the one presented by the MUST and the NRS-2002 (0.596, CI: 0.444-0.747), with significant statistics (p = 0.041). In addition, it presents high sensitivity and positive and negative predictive value.

Conclusions:

MST is a more valid nutritional screening method than MUST and NRS-2002 to predict the loss of lean mass > 5% in oncological patients undergoing radiotherapy treatment. Its routine use is recommended in patients under radiotherapy treatment.

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