Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment in relation to site, stage of the illness, reason for hospital admission, and mortality in patients with gynecological tumors

Abstract

Purpose

This study aimed to identify factors related to the illness and to oncological treatment as determinants of the nutritional status of patients with gynecological tumors.

Methods

This is a retrospective study; the group was composed of 146 women histopathologically shown to have gynecological tumors, at different stages of treatment, and hospitalized at the foremost centers for the prevention and treatment of cancer in Rio de Janeiro. To obtain a nutritional diagnosis, we used the Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA). We did multiple comparisons of the numeric variables between the three PG-SGA nutritional status-classification groups by performing Kruskal-Wallis analysis of variance. We used the Mann-Whitney test to compare numerical variables between two groups. We analyzed the associations between categorical variables by using either the chi-squared (χ ²) test or Fisher’s exact test.

Results

Of the women, 62.4 % were found to be at nutritional risk or to have some level of malnourishment, being more associated with the reason for hospital admission and stage disease that properly to the tumor site. The median PG-SGA score was points, with 62.3 % of the group returning 9 or more points. Women diagnosed with endometrial cancer were found to be predominantly well nourished, and those with tumors in the ovary were more frequently diagnosed as being severely malnourished.

Conclusions

Our findings support early nutritional intervention in the population identified as being at greater nutritional risk, aiming to minimize the loss of muscle mass and body weight, as well as to improve symptoms management, thus helping to achieve better clinical results.