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Validity and reliability of the new Canadian Nutrition Screening Tool in the 'real-world' hospital setting Methodological issues

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition volume 69, page 864 (2015)Cite this article

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Misdiagnosis and mismanagement of the patients in routine clinical care cannot be avoided using inappropriate tests to assess reliability and validity.

I was interested to read the paper by Laporte M et al. that was published in Dec 2014 of Eur J Clin Nutr.1 They aimed to validate and assess the reliability of the Canadian Nutrition Screening Tool (CNST) in the 'real-world' hospital setting. Based on their results, the CNST completed by site coordinators showed good sensitivity (91.7%) and specificity (74.8%). In the subsample of untrained personnel (160 nurses; one DT), tool's reliability was excellent (Kappa=0.88), sensitivity was good (>90%) but specificity was low (47.8%). However, using a two-item ('yes' on both weight change and food intake) version of the tool improved the specificity (85.9%).1 They concluded that the simple and reliable CNST shows good sensitivity and specificity and significantly predicts adverse outcomes.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Safety Promotion and Injury Prevention Research Center, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

    S Sabour

  2. Department of Clinical Epidemiology, School of Health, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

    S Sabour

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  1. S Sabour
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Correspondence to S Sabour.

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Sabour, S. Validity and reliability of the new Canadian Nutrition Screening Tool in the 'real-world' hospital setting Methodological issues. Eur J Clin Nutr 69, 864 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ejcn.2015.69

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