In response to the director letter “Polyphenols, Mediterranean diet, and colon cancer”

Excerpt

We appreciate the contribution made to our manuscript [1] by Mattioli AV et al. in their letter to the director [2]. We agree with them that lifestyle and nutrition strongly influence the development and outcome of colon cancer [3]. As they also showed, it is well documented that hospitalized malnourished patients present a higher risk of complications, morbidity, mortality, readmissions, significantly longer hospital stays, and higher quality of life decreased than those nourished [4‐6]. Malnourishment is particularly frequent in colorectal patients due to the characteristics of the organs affected by the disease, its severity, and the usually older age of patients [3]. To measure nutritional status, there are different objective indicators. In Spain, a CONUT (Malnutrition Control) screening system [7] has been validated to detect, with, theoretically, routine analyses (albumin, lymphocytes, cholesterol), those patients with possible malnutrition at hospital admission. In our study, we collected these analytic parameters, but some of them, as lymphocyte number or albumin level, had a high rate of missing data which would had compromised the validity of our models if included on them. Therefore, we decided not to consider them for our models. …