Journal of Liver

Hand grip strength as a nutritional assessment tool in patients with liver cirrhosis

CO-ORGANIZED EVENT: 5^th World Congress on Hepatitis & Liver Diseases & 2^nd International Conference on Pancreatic Cancer & Liver Diseases

August 10-12, 2017 London, UK

A Elmeligui, S Mogawer, S Elkholy, M Mansour and R Elmessiery

Cairo University, Egypt

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Liver

Abstract:

Background: Protein calorie malnutrition (PCM) has been described in 50 to 100 percent of patients with decompensated cirrhosis and at least 20 percent with compensated cirrhosis. PCM is associated with many complications including development of variceal bleeding and ascites, increased surgical morbidity and mortality, reduced survival and worsening hepatic function. Yet, there is no gold standard method for nutritional assessment of these patients up till now. Participants & Methods: This is a case control study that was designed to analyze data from 78 Egyptian patients with child C liver cirrhosis. Subjective global assessment (SGA), anthropometric tools, hand grip strength (HGS) were used to assess the nutritional status of these patients. It also included 50 healthy volunteers with matched age, gender and area of residence. Results: Severe PEM was prevalent among the patients; HGS was highly correlated to the degree of malnutrition (p-value=0.008). ROC curve analysis showed a criterion of 17.6 with specificity 90% and sensitivity of 60%. Conclusion: PEM is prevalent among patients with cirrhosis. Nutritional assessment in decompensated patients remains a challenge for clinicians. HGS is a simple, bed side tool that can be used to assess the muscle status and can be used in a complementary manner with other methods for proper assessment of the patients.