A narrative review of general principles of nutrition status assessment in hospitalized adult patients

Hospital malnutrition with the global prevalence of 22-50%, includes a wide range ofnutrient deficiencies, as well as overweight and weight loss. The purpose of this study was tointroduce nutritional assessment and nutritional status examination in hospitalized patients. This study was conducted by reviewing the Persian and English articlespublished from 1990 to 2018 in PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct, Google Scholar, Medscape,Iranmedex, and SID database using the English keywords, such as "malnutrition" OR "undernutrition" AND "nutritional assessment" OR "nutrition examination" OR "nutrition survey". This study was conducted on a total of 21 studies derived from 415 articles related to thenutritional assessment in hospitalized patients. The obtained results were indicative of the necessityof accurate assessment of nutritional status with the relevant tools for the prevention of malnutritionand its complications in hospitalized patients. Overall, the results showed that it is essential to have a detailed and comprehensiveassessment, including nutritional history, assessment of food-drug interactions; use of new screeningtools for nutritionassessment, and nutrition information questionnaires. The lack of a single clinicalor laboratory scale that provides a supplementary nutritional status assessment means that it isimportant to collect and use information from a variety of sources, including history, physicalexamination, anthropometrics, dietary intake, and biochemical indices