Nutritional Assessment of Advanced Cancer Patients Admitted to Home Palliative Care

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the nutrition profile of advanced cancer patients who were admitted to specialized home palliative care.

Methods: A consecutive sample of home care patients at admission of home care was assessed. Depression, anxiety, nausea, poor appetite, and poor well-being were measured by numerical scale 0-10.  Mini nutritional assessment form (MNA-SF), fatigue assessment scale (FAS), and sarcopenia bySARC-F.  were performed. The use of drugs used for anorexia, including corticosteroids, progestins, or others, was recorded.

Results: Data of 135 patients were analyzed.Sixty-eight per cent and 77% of patients resulted to bee malnourished and sarcopenic. In the multivariate regression analysis, anxiety (p=0.036) and total FAS (p=0.013) were independently associated with malnutrition. Fifty-five per cent of patients were receiving corticosteroids or megestol acetate. No significant associations with parameters examined were found.

Conclusion: The majority of advanced cancer patients admitted to home palliative care were malnourished independently of the primary tumor diagnosis. Indeed, fatigue and anxiety were independently associated with malnutrition

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Not applicable

The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.