A Review of Nutritional Screening Tools for Hospitalized Children

Malnutrition is highly prevalent in hospitalized children and it is associated with severe morbidity and mortality outcomes. In addition malnutrition increases duration of hospitalization and hospital costs. Because of these reasons, so as to prevent the malnutrition several nutritional screening tools have been developed for hospitalized children in the last years. There are nine screening tools available in the literature. The screening tools should be valid and reliable. Beside this it is important that screening tools should be simple and take less time. Currently, there is no standardized nutritional screening tool for pediatric inpatients like adult inpatients. Tools should be revised and reevaluated with using anthropometric measurements, according to WHO growth charts. Besides, the accuracy of screening tools may improve if screening tools are standardized for certain diseases (cancer, kidney failure etc.), certain states (intensive care unit patients) or age groups.