Nutritional status, prognostic nutritional index, and preoperative nutritional support as prognostic factors in clinical outcome of gastrointestinal cancer patients

Introduction: Cancer patients are at risk for malnutrition. Nutrition screening using Subjective Global Assessment and Prognostic Nutritional Index (PNI) was associated with post-operative outcomes. Preoperative nutrition support should be given before patient undergo elective surgery. This study aims to find the relationship between nutritional status, PNI, dura-tion of preoperative nutritional support to clinical outcome of gastrointestinal cancer patients, which are postoperative complications and length of stay.Methods: This is a cross-sectional study of 72 eligible sub-jects of 132 participants with gastrointestinal cancer who un-derwent surgery and met the research criteria, using medical records data. Moderate malnutrition was observed to be higher with preoperative PNI values less than 35.Result: There was no significant relationship between nu-tritional status, PNI, duration of preoperative nutritional sup-port on the incidence of infection and surgical complications and total length of stay of postoperative gastrointestinal can-cer patients.Conclusion: there was no significant correlation between 3 variables with the incidence postoperative complications and total length of hospital stay, but there was a significant relationship between the duration of preoperative nutritional support and the postoperative length of hospital stay in pa-tients with gastrointestinal cancer.