Capacidade de identificação de risco nutricional em idosos pelo Malnutrition Screening Tool em relação à miniavaliação nutricional.

Objective: To verify the ability to identify nutritional risk by the Malnutrition Screening Tool compared to the Nutritional Mini-Assessment in the elderly and to identify the prevalence of nutritional risk and malnutrition in the evaluated public. Methodology: Cross-sectional, analytical study with screening and nutritional assessment of hospitalized elderly patients (> = 60 years), using the methods Malnutrition Screening Tool and Nutritional Mini-Assessment. Results: A total of 106 patients were evaluated, with 48,1% presenting nutritional risk and 22,6% presenting malnutrition according to the Mini Nutritional Assessment. Malnutrition Screening Tool found nutritional risk in 52,8% of patients within the first 48 hours of hospitalization. Regarding the ability of Malnutrition Screening Tool in identifying nutritional risk in elderly patients, compared to the Nutritional Mini-Assessment, there was an association between the tests (p <0,02), but with a tendency to a false negative, because 19,8 % of patients classified as nonnutritional risk by the Malnutrition Screening Tool had nutritional risk by the Nutritional Mini-Assessment. Conclusions: The use of both methods is confirmed for those with nutritional risk, and cannot be extended to those without nutritional risk due to the divergence between the analyzes, and may have the false negative in the Malnutrition Screening Tool scale evaluations.