Association of Nutritional Status using the Short Nutritional Assessment Questionnaire (SNAQ) and Malnutrition Risk using the Malnutrition Screening Tool (MST) with In-Hospital Mortality and Intensive Care Unit Admission Among Non-Critically-Ill Patients: A Single Center, Prospective Cohort Study.

Background and objective: Although nutritional assessment tools have been available internationally, local data for their use in foreseeing adverse outcomes among admitted patients are currently unavailable. The primary objective of this study was to determine the association of nutritional status using Short Nutritional Assessment Questionnaire (SNAQ) and malnutrition risk using the Malnutrition Screening Tool (MST) with intensive care unit (ICU) admission and in-hospital mortality.

Methodology: This was a prospective-cohort study which included 122 purposively-selected adult participants who were non-intubated, admitted for medical and surgical management, stayed for at least 24 hours, had no COVID-19 infection, and were not admitted in any critical care unit. The SNAQ and MST questionnaires, which are validated tools and consists of two to three easy-to-answer questions, were used among the participants and their scores were tallied in order to get their nutritional status and malnutrition risk. Primary endpoints measured were the length of hospital stay, incidence of mortality, and ICU admission rate. Comorbidities were taken into account using the Charlson Comorbidity Index.

Results: Categorizing the SNAQ scores showed 33.61% were severely malnourished, which was similar when using the MST classification, wherein 34.43% were at risk of malnutrition. None of the participants were admitted to the ICU. Malnutrition risk and nutritional status was not significantly associated with 30-day in-hospital mortality (p >0.05). On the other hand, results of the Cox proportional hazards showed that SNAQ and MST significantly predicted the hazard of 30-day in-hospital mortality, increasing the hazard of mortality by 2.58 times and 3.67 times, respectively, for every 1-unit increase in SNAQ and MST scores. Similarly, nutritional status using the SNAQ classification indicated the severely malnourished category significantly predicted the hazard of mortality, increasing it by 9.22 times for those who are severely malnourished. Also, malnutrition risk using the MST classification indicated that those who were at risk of malnutrition were 9.80 times greater hazard of mortality than those who were not at risk of malnutrition.

Conclusion: The MST and SNAQ classification are screening tools for nutritional status (SNAQ) and malnutrition risk (MST) that can be administered at the onset of the patient's hospital course and have been demonstrated in this study to predict 30-day in-hospital mortality. It is important to note that none of the patients included in this study required intensive care unit admission.