Perioperative Nutrition Care of Orthopedic Surgery Patient

Abstract

Despite evidence that malnutrition is associated with significant complications in orthopedic surgery¹, unrecognized malnutrition continues to be a "silent epidemic", effecting up to 50% of hospitalized patients. Specifically, pre-surgical malnutrition is associated with increased risk for surgical site infections, increased length of hospital stay, and increased health care costs in patients following total joint arthroplasty. Serologic markers (i.e. serum albumin and total lymphocyte count), anthropometric measurements, (i.e. calf muscle circumference and triceps skin fold) and assessment and screening tools (i.e. The Rainey-MacDonald Nutritional Index, the Mini Nutrition Assessment Short Form, the Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool and the Nutrition Risk Screening 2002) have all been used to aid in the diagnosis of malnutrition in orthopedic patients, yet there is no universal gold standard for screening or assessing nutritional risk and no accepted guideline for perioperative nutritional optimization in this patient population. Recently, the Perioperative Nutrition Screen (PONS) was introduced² as an easy and efficient way to preoperatively identify and risk stratify patients for malnutrition in order to guide perioperative nutrition optimization. Given malnutrition is associated with increased risk of surgical site infections and increased length of hospital stay, adequate assessment of perioperative risk for malnutrition and preoperative nutrition optimization, including structured weight loss in the obese population, consumption of high protein oral nutritional supplements, immunonutrition oral supplements and adequate glucose control, may improve perioperative outcomes. The presence of a Registered Dietician (RD) should be a standard of care in all pre-operative clinics to improve nutrition care and surgical outcomes.

Figure 1.

PeriOperative Nutrition Score (PONS) Assessment Tool (PONS; adapted from reference [2]). PONS utilizes questions from the validated Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool to assess for malnutrition risk in perioperative patients. Any positive answer to any of the PONS score questions is considered to be at high risk for surgical malnutrition and the patient should receive preoperative nutrition therapy prior to surgery.