Effects of an intervention on nutrition consultation for cancer patients

Abstract

We assessed whether cancer patients given a nutritional consultation by dietitians when discharged from the hospital experienced more health benefits than those not given a nutritional consultation. The McNemar test and the general linear model were used to examine the effect of nutrition intervention. A bubble chart was plotted to show the comparison between cancer groups. A total of 537 cancer patients discharged from a 1200-bed medical centre in Taiwan in 2011 were randomly divided into experimental and control groups. In the experimental group, nutritional status [evaluated using the Subjective Global Assessment (SGA) Classification technique], weight loss, and food intake recovery were significantly affected and returned to their usual levels, but in the control group, only food intake recovery was significantly affected. The effect of nutrition consultation intervention for cancer patients is thus evident. Significant positive effects were cancer-stage-dependent but not cancer-type-dependent. Future studies are recommended using the present study's methods to see whether the nutrition intervention effect occurs in cancer patients discharged from other hospitals throughout the world.

Empowering patient education on self-care activity among patients with colorectal cancer – a research protocol for a randomised trial

“…Interventions have included individualised nutritional support and counselling to reach protein and energy goals [14], personalised nutrition intervention [15][16][17], dietary counselling or advice [18,19], oral nutritional supplements (ONS), and nutrition advice with written information [18]. Interventions have proved to be effective on energy and protein intake [14][15][16][17][18][19], weight [15], QoL [14,16,17,19], morbidity and mortality [14,16,17] as well as the risk of adverse clinical outcomes at 30 days [14]. Among patients with head and neck cancer undergoing radiotherapy, individualised nutritional counselling compared to ad libitum diet and ONS was capable of sustaining a significant impact on patients' outcomes after 3 months' follow-up [16].…”