Nutritional assessment in patients with cancer

Abstract

This study aims at carrying out a cross-cultural adaptation of the Portuguese version of "Global Subjective Assessment - Produced by the Patient" (ASG-PPP), estimating its reproducibility, verifying the precision and correlation of the weight and height estimation methods used to assessment the nutrition status of patients with cancer. The subjects of this study will include all oncology patients greater than 18 years old, which have signed the free and clear up consent term, in treatment from March to December 2008 at the Hospital Amaral Carvalho (Jaú-SP). The sample will not include patients in the Intensive Therapy Unit, terminal patients or amputee patients. For the sample characterization it will be collected information with respect to age, gender, marital status, educational level, city of origin, tumor type, disease stage, and used therapy. For the nutrition status classification, considering the anthropometric indicators, it will be collected the real and estimated measures of weight and height, the body mass index (BMI), and the classification according to the ASG-PPP. The data will be counted and organized for all variables in the study. For the real and estimated weight and height it will be obtained central tendency measures with respect to 95% of confidence intervals. For the associations of interest it will be applied the chi-square test or the exact Fisher's test. It will be carried out correlation studies between the real and estimated weight variable, and the real and estimated height variable. The concordance in the classification of the nutrition status of the patients according to the relations real weight/usual weight, estimated weight/usual weight, and ASG-PPP will be estimated based on Kappa statistics. It will be adopted a 5% significance level to decision taken. (AU)