Evaluation of the Mini Nutritional Assessment short-form among the elderly population from Ethiopia

Background: Different tools have been used to perform a nutritional screening and assessment, and MNA is one of the widely used and recommended tools in the geriatrics population. MNA has two forms, long and short. However, MNA short-forms have not been evaluated in Ethiopia. Therefore, this study was aimed to evaluate MNA short form against MNA long-form tool among Ethiopian elders. Methods: One hundred and seventy-six randomly selected elders entered into the community-based cross-sectional validation study. Amputated, bedridden, those with visible deformity were excluded. Original MNA questionnaires were translated to Afan Oromo and Amharic languages. All translated and pretested MNA questionnaires were administered to each participant. The anthropometrics were measured. Reliability, validity, sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values were calculated. Receiver-operating characteristic curve (ROC-curve) analysis was plotted for MNA, to identify the area under the curve (AUC) and optimal cut-off value for prediction of malnutrition. Result: Strong association between MNA-long form score and MNA-short form score indicated by spearman’s rank correlation coefficients of BMI-MNA-SF 0.771,p < 0.05 and CC-MNA-SF 0.759, P < 0.05. Similar the agreement between the long and short form of MNA was found to be a weighted kappa 0.396(0.318, 0.474) for BMI-MNA-SF and 0.546(0.422, 0.669) for CC-MNA-SF at 95% CI. These values indicate moderate agreement with the MNA-long form. There is very good agreement between the BMI-MNA-SF and CC-MNA-SF 0.400(0.322, 0.478). Also, high power to identify two categories using MNA long-form as golden standard with AUC for BMI –MNA-SF 0.908 (0.865–0.951) and 0.880 (0.831–0.929) for CC-MNA-SF at 95% CI. Diagnostic accuracy of both versions of MNA-SF showed that 34.2% sensitivity, 100.0% specificity, 100.0% PPV, and 41.5% NPV for BMI-MNA-SF. Similar sensitivity 75.8%, specificity 83.9%, PPV 91.0%, and 61.8% NPV for CC-MNA-SF. Total Diagnostic accuracy for BMI-MNA-SF 55.12%, and 78.41% for CC-MNA-SF Conclusion: Both versions of MNA-SF were found to be valid screening tools in the Ethiopian elders against Long-form MNA.