Nutritional Status of Cancer Patients in Iran and Ways to Improve It

Introduction: Malnutrition is prevalent in cancer patients. Nutritional status of patients affects Patients quality of life and the cancer treatments as well as disease burden. The present review discusses about the nutritional status of cancer patients in Iran.Method: A complete search was performed about the nutritional status of cancer patients in electronic databases such as ISI web of science, PubMed, Scopus and google scholar as well as local databases including SID and Magiran.Results: There were few studies and surveys investigating the nutritional status of patients with malignancy. Khodashenas et al. reported that the prevalence of malnutrition according to the PG-SGA tool was 80% out of which 53% had moderate and 27% had severe malnutrition in 1024 outpatients in referral hospitals in Mashhad and Tehran. Zarif et al. performed a longitudinal study during chemotherapy in 71 cancer patients. Surprisingly, according to the Ottery’s PG-SGA questionnaire, 80% of the survived cases and 100% of the deceased patients required nutritional intervention. They also reported patients with stage IV of the malignancy, malignancy with Unknown Origin (MUO), upper gastrointestinal (GI) and lung cancers had the worst nutritional status. Jamshidi et al confirmed that GI cancer patients had the worse nutritional status than other types of cancers. Gholami et al. investigated the nutritional status of GI cancer patients who were candidate for surgery. At the time of admission, 74.5% of the patients were malnourished according to SGA tool. The malnutrition rates increased significantly to 98%, seven days after surgery.Conclusion: Malnutrition is prevalent in cancer patients in Iran. Thus, nutritional screening and monitoring and accordingly nutritional intervention is crucial; particularly at diagnosis and before surgery.