The Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) review of the literature--What does it tell us?

To review the literature on the MNA to Spring 2006, we searched MEDLINE, Web of Science and Scopus, and did a manual search in J Nutr Health Aging, Clin Nutr, Eur J Clin Nutr and free online available publications. VALIDATION AND VALIDITY: The MNA was validated against two principal criteria, clinical status and comprehensive nutrition assessment using principal component and discriminant analysis. The MNA shortform (MNA-SF) was developed and validated to allow a 2-step screening process. The MNA and MNA-SF are sensitive, specific, and accurate in identifying nutrition risk. NUTRITIONAL SCREENING: The prevalence of malnutrition in community-dwelling elderly (21 studies, n = 14149 elderly) is 2 +/- 0.1% (mean…