According to the estimated albumin concentrations for subjects without acute disease in our meta-analysis, use of a serum albumin cutoff of 3.5 g/dL as a marker of malnutrition would lead to under-diagnosis of malnutrition defined by all the validated nutrition screening tools (MNA, NRS-2002, MNA-SF, GNRI) except for SGA. Here, ALB is linked to nutritional deficiency disease.