Investigation of the consistency of the screening tools used to determine malnutrition prevalence in hemodialysis patients

Patients receiving dialysis treatment due to end-stage renal failure have various metabolic and nutritional disorders. Malnutrition is a common complication in patients undergoing hemodialysis and can adversely affect the results of treatment. Therefore, it is vital to determine the presence and degree of malnutrition in hemodialysis patients by using various screening methods. Our study was conducted with 121 patients receiving hemodialysis treatment at Özel Ada Dialysis Center. The study was planned to determine the prevalence of malnutrition in this patient group with two screening tools, Nutritional Risk Screening-2002 (NRS-2002) and Subjective Global Assessment (SGA), and to examine the consistency between the two screening tools. Patients were included in the study voluntarily. After the patient approval, NRS-2002 and SGA tests were applied first and the presence and degree of malnutrition were determined according to the responses of the patients. Then, body weight, height, body mass index, skinfold thickness, and mid-upper arm circumference measurements were taken as anthropometric measurements of the patients and the consistency of these measurements between NRS-2002 and SGA was examined. According to our results, the presence of malnutrition was found to be 14% according to NRS-2002, while the presence of malnutrition was found to be 12.4% according to SGA. The relationship between NRS-2002 and SGA was found to be statistically significant (p<0.05). In the anthropometric measurements of the patients, while a statistically significant and inverse relationship (p<0.05) was found between the skinfold thickness and SGA, no relationship was found with NRS-2002 (p>0.05). In the mid-upper arm circumference measurements, a statistically significant and inverse relationship was found with both screening tools (NRS-2002 and SGA) (p<0.05). Due to the compatibility between the two screening tools, it is thought that using only one of them will be sufficient to detect malnutrition, and it will save time and cost. Keywords:, hemodialysis, malnutrition, NRS, SGA