Prevalence of Malnutrition and 1-Year All-Cause Mortality in Institutionalized Elderly Patients Comparing Different Combinations of the GLIM Criteria

Background: The Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition (GLIM) provided a new approach for the diagnosis of malnutrition based on a number of phenotypic and etiologic criteria. However, different diagnostic criteria could potentially lead to heterogeneity in the diagnosis. We identified different subsets of criteria to define malnutrition in a cohort of elder nursing-home residents and investigated their clinical utility in terms of 1-year survival.

Methods: Our study included all residents (n = 485) from 3 nursing homes. We proposed 12 GLIM models based on different phenotypic and etiologic criteria. The main outcome was 1-year all-cause mortality. We also assessed the sensitivity and specificity for different phenotypic criteria using time-dependent receiver operating characteristic curves, and cutoff values were calculated.

Results: During 1 year of follow-ups, 94 deaths occurred. The prevalence of malnutrition was 13.5% for models based on reduced food intake (RFI) and 10.45% for models based on inflammation associated with acute disease (IAD). Unadjusted Cox regression analyses showed that malnutrition was associated with a 2.31- to 4.64-fold increase in mortality when diagnosed using IAD-dependent models or with a 1.37- to 1.78-fold increase in mortality using RFI-dependent models. Cutoffs associated with mortality for the phenotypic criteria were lower than those recommended in the GLIM criteria.

Conclusion: This study describes the association of several variations of the GLIM model with 1-year mortality in nursing-home residents. However, our data suggest a high heterogeneity to fulfill the GLIM criteria and the necessity of finding specific, tailored cutoff points for the studied populations.