[Nutritional assessment of patients before surgery]

Abstract

The identification of nutritional status is one of the objectives of the anaesthesia consultation often difficult to achieve routinely. It usually requires the use of multiple indicators, which are complex for a non-nutrition specialist. In preoperative period, nutritional assessment should be easy to do in order to identify patients who are malnourished or at risk of malnutrition and relevant information about nutritional risk should be registered in the patient chart. To facilitate this evaluation, we propose a stratification of nutritional risk in four grades (NG) using three types of simple and validated parameters: preoperative nutritional status (BMI, weight loss, eventually serum albumin), comorbidities and kind of surgery. This stratification can develop a tailored nutritional care for each patient.