Purpose: This study aims to explore the applicability of the Nutrition Risk Screening 2002 (NRS2002) tool in screening nutritional risk and the Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA) in determining nutrition status in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients.
Materials and Methods: NRS2002 and PG-SGA were simultaneously applied to evaluate the nutritional status of NPC patients before induction chemotherapy, as well as before and after radiotherapy. The PG-SGA results were considered golden standard in evaluating nutrition status, and the ROC curve value and Youden index were applied to analyze NRS2002 effectiveness in screening nutritional risk.
Results: A total of 102 NPC patients were included in this study. Patients with an NRS2002 score < 3 and PG-SGA score ≥ 4 accounted for 5.3% (5/95), 19.6% (18/92) and 94.8% (36/38) at the time before induction chemotherapy, before radiotherapy and at the end of radiotherapy, respectively. The cut-off values of NRS2002 scores all < 2 corresponded to the maximum Youden index at the three procedural times. And the area under curve (AUC) were 0.598 (P = 0.390), 0.665 (P = 0.015) and 0.940 (P = 0.034), respectively. At the end of radiotherapy, NRS2002 scores of < 3 and < 2 were used as cut-off values for nutritional risk screening, respectively. Additionally, the malnutrition-missed detection rates were 36.0% and 12.0% (χ ² = 15.789; P < 0.001).
Discussion: NRS2002 nutritional risk screening combined with the PG-SGA nutritional assessment has certain applicability in NPC. NRS2002 score ≥ 2 can be considered as a new cut-off point for nutritional assessment.
Keywords: nasopharyngeal carcinoma, nutritional risk screening, nutrition assessment, NRS2002, PG-SGA