University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, New Brunswick. Dear Editor: We appreciate Drs Ferguson, Isenring, Bauer, Banks, and Capra's1 comments regarding our recent Review of the A.S.P.E.N. Clinical Guidelines for Nutrition Support in Cancer Patients: Nutrition Screening and Assessment.2 They appropriately highlighted the difference between nutrition assessment and nutrition screening tools. They also correctly noted that in Table 1 of the article the Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (MUST) is incorrectly identified as the Malnutrition Screening Tool (MST). We apologize for this error. The MST is indeed a validated nutrition screening tool for cancer patients. The correspondents suggested that the revised guideline should clearly identify the PGSGA, SGA, and NRI as nutrition assessment tools. Ferguson et al rightfully identified that many of the tools referenced in Table 1 are self-styled nutrition assessment tools, in the sense that these tools help to predict outcomes and identify candidates for medical nutrition therapy. However, we feel that these tools really are not truly assessment tools, but instead they function as nutrition screening tools. The true purpose of nutrition assessment is to plan nutrition interventions. These tools, when used alone, do not provide all of the data required to develop the nutrition intervention. The A.S.P.E.N. clinical guidelines for nutrition assessment in adults3 currently state that nutrition assessment utilizes a combination of clinical and biochemical parameters to create a written assessment of this data, nutrition risk stratification and specific recommendations. These tools do not achieve the level of rigor required for a complete, formal nutrition assessment. Again, we thank the correspondents for their thoughtful and helpful comments. Sincerely,
Nutrition in Clinical Practice, Vol. 23, No. 6,
659 (2008)
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