ALB and malnutrition: CONUT is a nutritional evaluation score for evaluating immune-nutritional status, and this score is an efficient tool for continuous control of undernutrition in hospitalized patients (Chen et al., 2020), and it is derived from three parameters: 1) total lymphocyte count (an indicator of loss of immune defenses caused by malnutrition), 2) serum albumin (an indicator of protein reserve), and 3) total cholesterol level (a caloric depletion parameter), which are extracted easily from a blood examination (Takagi et al., 2019).