Abstract

Malnutrition and reduced food intake are strong predictors of negative outcome in hospitalized patients. In contrast, whether nutrition support is an effective therapy to treat disease-related
malnutrition and improve clinical outcome of malnourished hospitalized patients remains to be robustly demonstrated by large, prospective, randomized clinical trials. Although seemingly obvious, reducing weight loss or restoring body weight gain by nutrition support, i.e., counseling, oral nutritional supplements (ONS), enteral nutrition or parenteral nutrition, is not necessarily associated
with improved clinical outcome, i.e., morbidity, quality of life, mortality. This sort of misunderstanding might have contributed to the insufficient implementation of nutritional care in hospitals across the planet. Indeed, clinicians may value the role of nutritional status in preserving healthy conditions, but they may also prioritize other outcome measures in hospitalized patients rather than only body weight. Therefore, it appears that clinical trials targeting clinical rather than only nutritional outcome measures could have amajor impact on changing daily practice.