Applicability of five nutritional screening tools in Chinese patients undergoing colorectal cancer surgery: a cross-sectional study

OBJECTIVES: To identify the most appropriate nutritional risk screening tool for patients undergoing colorectal cancer surgery, five nutritional screening tools, including the Nutritional Risk Screening 2002 (NRS 2002), Short Form of Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA-SF), Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (MUST), Malnutrition Screening Tool (MST) and Nutritional Risk Index (NRI), were employed to evaluate the nutritional risk at admission and short-term clinical outcome prediction. DESIGN: A cross-sectional study. SETTING: A comprehensive affiliated hospital of a university in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China. PARTICIPANTS: 301 patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer were continuously recruited to complete the study from October 2020 to May 2021. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: Within 48 hours of hospital admission, five nutritional screening tools were used to measure the nutritional risk and to determine their relationship with postoperative short-term clinical outcomes. RESULTS: The nutritional risk assesed by the five tools ranged from 25.2% to 46.2%. Taking the Subject Global Assessment as the diagnostic standard, MNA-SF had the best consistency (κ=0.570, p<0.001) and MST had the highest sensitivity (82.61%). Multivariate Logistic regression analysis after adjusting confounding factors showed that the NRS 2002 score ≥3 (OR 2.400, 95% CI 1.043 to 5.522) was an independent risk factor for postoperative complications and was the strongest predictor of postoperative complications (area under the curve 0.621, 95% CI 0.549 to 0.692). The scores of NRS 2002 (r=0.131, p<0.001), MNA-SF (r=0.115, p<0.05) and NRI (r=0.187, p<0.05) were poorly correlated with the length of stay. There was no correlation between the five nutritional screening tools and hospitalisation costs (p>0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Compared with the other four nutritional screening tools, we found that NRS 2002 is the most appropriate nutritional screening tool for Chinese patients with colorectal cancer.