Investigation of nutritional status in Chinese patients with common cancer

The negative influence of malnutrition on patients with malignant tumors runs through the whole course of a disease. To the best of our knowledge, the nutritional status of cancer patients has not yet been reported in a large sample size. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the status of malnutrition and nutritional support therapy in a large sample of patients with common malignant tumors in China. In this observational multicenter study, 80 tertiary hospitals in 22 major provinces and cities were selected using a two-stage random sampling method. A total of 47,488 hospitalized patients with 16 kinds of common malignant tumors were enrolled in this study. The nutritional status of the patients was assessed by the scored Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA). The severity of malnutrition was identified by a quantitative assessment where 0–1 was labelled as no malnutrition and 2–3, 4–8, and ≥9 were defined as suspected/mild, moderate and severe malnutrition. The PG-SGA scores of patients with different tumor characteristics were compared by a variance analysis. The incidence rate of moderate and severe malnutrition was 58.2%, of which 32.1% and 26.1% fell under the category of moderate and severe malnutrition, 22.2% were suspected/mild and only 19.6% of the sample were not malnourished. The incidence of malnutrition varied in respect to tumor species, age, gender, tumor stage, treatment and region: The PG-SGA score of pancreatic cancer patients was the highest (9.58±5.74), and that of breast cancer patients was the lowest (3.51±3.49); The PG-SGA score of vs. 5.60, P = 0.006) and gastric cancer (8.36 vs. 7.81, P