Assessment of Malnutrition

Excerpt

To the editor: Balducci and associates (1) claim to have compared malnourished subjects to those with normal nutritional status. As in most articles on hospital malnutrition, they have used imprecise diagnostic criteria to define malnutrition. By their definition, a subject is malnourished if he has either an involuntary weight loss of 6% or more of original body weight in 2 months or a creatinine-height ratio (which they incorrectly label as creatinine-height index) at or below 7.0 mg/cm height. The authors defend their diagnostic criteria by stating that they were "previously established." The article (2) cited by Balducci and associates, however,