A potential new way of defining the risk of malnutrition and its correlation with biological age

Abstract

Malnutrition is a common underdiagnosed condition worldwide both in hospital and outpatient settings. It is associated with higher levels of complications and mortality, poorer outcomes and higher hospital costs. Thanks to various initiatives in the field of nutrition, new screening and assessment methods for the detection of malnutrition are constantly being developed, which are intended to be time-saving and convenient. However, there is evidence of them being not sufficiently implemented in medical practice. With our pilot study, we hope to develop a new idea to address this problem. The idea of automating nutritional screening seems attractive and could help healthcare facilities around the world not to underestimate the importance of diagnosing malnutrition. By analysing routinely done blood tests on patients, the results of their nutritional screening and relying on literature data, we have developed a pilot formula that allows us to estimate the risk of malnutrition in a patient. While our results do not yet report the formula results being as sensitive as existing screening or assessment methods, however, it is a promising and prospective direction for the effective diagnosis of malnutrition. The correlation of malnutrition not only with blood parameters, but also with patient age, was an area of interest to me. Existing studies indicate a more relevant biological age for predicting morbidity and mortality, which differs from the chronological age due to changes at the cellular and molecular level. Assuming that this indicator correlates better with the presence of malnutrition, in the second part of the thesis an analysis of this relationship was performed. The results obtained give the impression of a correlation between biological age and malnutrition, which also opens up new horizons for the research in this field.