Key Points
Assessing the true nutritional status of an older person is a task not easily performed, being frequently complicated by the presence of excess cytokine production (which leads to many of the same effects as protein undernutrition) as well as other factors.
Assessment of recent weight status is thus generally the best indicator of nutritional deficit.
This chapter reviews a number of recently developed nutritional screening tools and laboratory tests used for nutritional assessment.
While the most practical nutrition assessment tools are simple ones, the interpretation is still fraught with difficulty.