Handgrip strength as a hospital admission nutritional risk screening method.

Objective: To investigate if handgrip strength (HGS) could be used as a single screening procedure in identifying patients who are classified as being undernourished or nutritionally-at-risk at hospital admission.
Design: Cross-sectional study. In the second day of hospital admission, HGS was evaluated and results were compared with Nutritional Risk Screening (NRS-2002).
Setting: Two public hospitals in Porto, Portugal, a university and a district one.
Subjects: A probabilistic sample of 50% in-patients from each hospital of 314 patients (age range of 18-96) was studied. Patients were considered eligible if they were >or=18 years old and able to give informed consent. Hand pain, upper limb deformities, incapacity to perform muscle strength measurements and pregnancy were considered further exclusion criteria.
Results: Patients identified as undernourished by NRS-2002 (37.9%) were older, shorter and lighter, with a lower functional capacity, a longer length of stay and a lower HGS (P<0.001). When comparing patients with lower HGS (first quartile) with those with the highest HGS (fourth quartile), this parameter revealed good sensitivity (86.7%) and specificity (70.2%) and a k=0.56. Multivariate analysis showed that patients with higher HGS had an independent decreased risk of being at nutritional risk (P for trend <0.001) odds ratio=0.19 (95% confidence interval=0.08-0.48). Our entire sample of hospitalized patients was -1.96 Z-score below the HGS cutoff of distribution data for healthy individuals.
Conclusions: HGS identifies a high proportion of nutritionally-at-risk patients and can be a reliable first screening tool for nutritional risk in hospitals.