Identifying Critically-ill Patients With COVID-19 Who Will Benefit Most From Nutrition Support Therapy: Validation of the NUTRIC Nutritional Risk Assessment Tool

Heyland et al. previously proposed a novel scoring tool, the Nutrition Risk in Critically ill (NUTRIC) score, which is the first nutritional risk assessment tool developed and validated specifically for intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Many other risk scores and assessment tools exist to quantify nutrition risk but none have been specifically designed for ICU patients. Indeed, they generally consider all critically ill patients to be at high nutritional risk. However, the recognition that not all ICU patients will respond the same to nutritional interventions was the critical concept behind the NUTRIC score. There was an interaction between mortality, nutritional intake and NUTRIC score suggesting that those with higher NUTRIC scores benefited the most from increasing nutritional intake. However, the inferences about the validity of the NUTRIC score are limited in Chinese patients because of no data.

The current outbreak of novel coronavirus was first reported from Wuhan, China on Dec ember 31 , 2019 . This virus was named as 2019 nCoV by World Health Organization ( on Jan uary 12 , 2020). Following the advice of the Emergency Committee, the WHO declared the outbreak of 2019 nCoV a Public Health Emergency of International Concern . Patients show fever and / or respiratory symptoms, with the imaging characteristics of pneumonia, and other symptoms include hemoptysis muscle pain, headache, confusion, chest pain, and diarrhea. About 16% patients need ICU admission.

The objective of this study is to validation of the "NUTRIC" nutritional risk assessment tool in Chinese ICU patients diagnosed as COVID-19. This is a single-center, prospective cohort study of ICU patients with COVID-19. Data for all variables of the NUTRIC score will be collected. These include age, APACHE II score, SOFA score, number of co-morbidities, days from hospital admission to ICU admission. A logistic model including the NUTRIC score, the nutritional adequacy and their interaction will be estimated to assess if the NUTRIC score modified the association between nutritional adequacy and 28-day mortality.