Assessment of Nutritional Status of Patients With Liver Cirrhosis

Cirrhosis is the twelfth leading cause of death worldwide. Malnutrition is prevalent among cirrhotic patients and is an important prognostic factor. Nutritional assessment is therefore crucial for identifying patients at risk or with already established malnutrition and refer them for nutritional intervention and support. In the current literature, nutritional assessment of cirrhotic patients is performed using several tools and methods. However their accuracy is widely affected by the underline disease and its complications. In addition, for the majority of the parameters under study, no gold standard tools and methods have been established so far. Studies on nutritional assessment in cirrhosis usually focus on one or few aspects of nutritional status and not on a full nutritional assessment combining information from medical, biochemical, nutritional, and body composition variables. Hence, the present study aims at a thorough assessment of the nutritional status of 170 cirrhotic patients using multiple widely available tools and methods, in order to assess their accuracy and estimate the prevalence of multiple malnutrition phenotypes such as undernutrition, sarcopenia, sarcopenic obesity and cachexia.