Abstract
Purpose: Controlling nutritional status (CONUT) is a simplified yardstick for the nutritional assessment of undernourished inpatients. For the effective screening of undernourished inpatients with test data, we thoroughly explored the clinical validity of a modified CONUT method.
Methods: We measured the total cholesterol (T-Cho) of subjects. We came up with a modified CONUT method, whereby T-Cho for which there were more requests from inpatients would be included, whereas T-Cho for which the requests were fewer would be excluded. We determined the degree of concordance with regard to the nutrition level between the modified CONUT method and the conventional CONUT method. We also determined correlations between the scores achieved using these methods.
Results: The measured T-Cho rate was 15.4%. The degree of concordance with regard to the nutritional level between the modified CONUT method and the conventional CONUT method was κ = 0.778. The Spearman coefficient between the score of the modified CONUT method and that of CONUT method was rs = 0.942.
Conclusion: The correlation between scores and degree of concordance with regard to the nutritional level between the modified CONUT method and the conventional CONUT method were favorable. It was suggested that the modified method would presumably be as useful as the conventional CONUT method for the screening of undernourished inpatients. Using hemoglobin (Hb), for which requests are higher than T-cho from inpatients, the modified CONUT method makes it possible to nutritionally screen a greater number of inpatients.
