Comparative nutrition evaluation with the Mini Nutritional Assessment and the Nutritional Risk Assessment Scale.

35 Malnutrition in geriatric hospital inpatients over 75 years old is one of the strongest indicators of a poor outcome, including mortality. A subjective rating of the nutritional status correlated strongly (p ! 0.001) with the subsequent mortality at follow-up times of 6, 18, and 30 months after discharge from hospital. Mortality was twice as high in malnourished patients as in normally nourished patients and four times higher than in overweight patients [1]. We therefore developed an assessment of nutritional risk in order to identify possible nutritional interventions; this also included risk indicators for the future development of malnutrition owing to factors that might be related to the hospital admission itself [2]. In the present study we compared our nutritional assessment – the nutritional risk assessment scale (NuRAS) – with the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) [3].