Can Nutritional Assessment Tools Predict Response to Nutritional Therapy?

Traditional tools and scoring systems for nutritional assessment have focused solely on parameters of poor nutritional status in the past, in an effort to define the elusive concept of malnutrition. Such tools fail to account for the contribution of disease severity to overall nutritional risk. High nutritional risk, caused by either deterioration of nutritional status or greater disease severity (or a combination of both factors), puts the patient in a metabolic stress state characterized by adverse outcome and increased complications. Newer scoring systems for determining nutritional risk, such as the Nutric Score and the Nutritional Risk Score-2002 have created a paradigm shift connecting assessment and treatment with quality outcome measures of success. Clinicians now have the opportunity to identify high risk patients through their initial assessment, provide adequate or sufficient nutrition therapy, and expect improved patient outcomes as a result. These concepts are supported by observational and prospective interventional trials. Greater clinical experience and refinement in these scoring systems are needed in the future to optimize patient response to nutrition therapy.