ALB and malnutrition: 2014, Bohl et al. 2016, Kamath et al. 2016, Schroer et al. 2019). The majority of these studies define malnutrition as a serum albumin < 3.5 g/dL. In the context of malnutrition, serum albumin serves as standard serological biomarker. In their review of blood biomarkers associated with malnutrition, Zhang et al. (2017) promoted the use of total protein, as it is considered less sensitive to acute disease stress.