Objectives: The Mini-Nutritional Assessment Short Form (MNA-SF) may be insufficient for screening and assessing the nutritional status of community-dwelling older adults. We modified MNA-SF to improve the ability for discriminating those at risk of malnutrition. Setting and participants: 123 community-dwelling elderly Japanese. Methods: Nutritional status was examined by the subjective global assessment (SGA), the geriatric nutritional risk index (GNRI) and MNA-SF. The reference standard for the diagnosis of “at risk of malnutrition” was composed from the SGA and GNRI. Specific factors associated with malnutrition in community-dwelling older adults were extracted from a literature survey and classified by a principal component analysis. A new 8-item MNA-home was constructed by adding two items from these components to the MNA-SF and compared with the MNA-SF by applying a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. Results: Among the various potential MNA-home scores, the ROC curve revealed that the MNA-SF plus two items, namely an inability to prepare own meals and no motivation to go out, produced the largest area under the curve (AUC), this value being greater than that from the MNA-SF. The score of MNA-home was significantly correlated with serum albumin and hemoglobin, although the score of MNA-SF was not. The cutoff value for predicting at risk of malnutrition was <14 in the MNA-home. Conclusion: The new MNA-home had a better discriminating ability than the MNA-SF to identify those at risk of malnutrition in community-dwelling older adults. A subsequent long-term study is necessary to validate this MNA-home for correctly discriminating community-dwelling older adults at risk of malnutrition.
Association between geriatric nutritional risk index and stroke risk in hemodialysis patients: 10-Years outcome of the Q-Cohort study
