Welcome to InBody’s monthly newsletter, "BWA Insights".
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Nutritional care for hospitalized and surgical patients plays a vital role in preventing complications and enhancing treatment outcomes. Its importance is widely acknowledged in clinical settings. In Korea, serum albumin levels are commonly used as a marker for nutritional status and are also applied as a reimbursement criterion for intensive nutritional therapy under the national health insurance system.
However, global experts in clinical nutrition have increasingly questioned the validity of using serum albumin alone to diagnose malnutrition, especially in the presence of inflammation. Although albumin has traditionally been viewed as a marker of nutritional status, it is now better understood as a negative acute-phase reactant that reflects inflammatory activity rather than nutritional reserves. ¹
In response to these concerns, four major clinical nutrition societies—ASPEN, ESPEN, FELANPE, and PENSA—collaborated to establish the Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition (GLIM) criteria in September 2018. ² These criteria emphasize that muscle mass assessment is an essential component of nutritional evaluation. As evidence supporting this continues to grow, countries like Japan and France are increasingly incorporating muscle mass as a core parameter in routine nutritional assessments.
In this issue, we delve into the role of muscle mass evaluation within the GLIM framework and explore why assessing muscle mass is critical for effective nutritional management.
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Index
The Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition (GLIM) was launched in 2016 as a joint effort by four leading international clinical nutrition societies—ESPEN, ASPEN, FELANPE, and PENSA—to establish a global consensus on the definition and diagnosis of malnutrition.²
Traditional methods of nutritional assessment have often relied on subjective clinical judgment, and varying diagnostic criteria across countries limited the comparability of research and hindered coordinated global action.