跳至主要内容

Malnutrition Reduces Quality of Life and Performance in Hospitalized Elderly

Malnutrition is a disorder of nutritional status due to reduced nutrient intake or impaired metabolism. It comprises a broad spectrum of clinical conditions from mild to very severe and has serious implications for health, recovery from illness or surgery, and hospital costs. Malnutrition has been frequently described among the elderly in hospital patients; this condition is often underestimated and considered as one of the aspects of aging. In this paper, the authors measured the incidence of malnutrition and its consequences on general health, physical and mental performance in a cohort of elderly patients. 

A cross-sectional study was conducted in a geriatric inpatient unit. Three hundred patients admitted to the clinic who fulfilled the inclusion criteria were enrolled. Nutritional status was evaluated by Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) questionnaire, macro and micronutrients intake, anthropometric measures and biochemical parameters. Physical and mental performances were recorded by questionnaires. Muscular strength was measured by a hand dynamometer and clinical outcomes were recorded.

Patients with poor nutritional status have lower physical and mental performance as respect to well-nourished patients. Undernourished patients have longer hospitalization and worst outcomes. We observe a high prevalence of severe hypovitaminosis D and the intake of various micronutrients was severely unbalanced. The incidence of malnutrition was 25% (75 patients); 39% (119 patients) were at risk of malnutrition. MNA was inversely related with the length of hospital stay (R = -0.25, p = 0.012) and with Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) (R = -0.56, p = 0.000), whereas directly related with cognitive performance measured through Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) (R = 0.5, p = 0.000) and hand grip strength (R = 0.35, p = 0.000). 

In conclusion, it’s shown that malnutrition has an important role in determining elderly independence, physical and mental performance and in predicting health outcomes, hence the hospital teams have to pay great attention to this problem even in community dwelling elderly.
                                      

Article by Patrizia D’Amelio, et al, from Italy.

Full access: http://mrw.so/4x3PIp

评论

发表评论

此博客中的热门博文

Does Immigration Promote the Investment of the Monopolistic Firm?

In the present paper, we examine the effect of increasing uncertainty of immigrants’ growth on the optimal timing of investment of a firm that has a monopolistic power over the labor market. It is revealed that when the uncertainty of immigrants’ growth is more than a threshold level, increasing uncertainty of immigrants’ growth accelerates the optimal timing of firms’ investment and enhances the economic growth, even if the uncertainty of immigrants’ growth is formulated by the geometric Brownian motion, which is in sharp contrast to the standard result that an increase in the uncertainty postpones the optimal timing. With an increase in the immigrants over the past ten years, workforces in the host countries have been growing significantly to the extent that the immigrants represent 70% of the increase in the workforce in Europe, and 47% in the United States as OECD indicates. In the present paper, we attempted to investigate the effect of increased uncertainty caused by the growi...
发表评论
阅读全文

Education Policy Implementation: A Mechanism for Enhancing Primary Education Development in Zanzibar

Education is one of the fundamental rights of individuals; therefore, the government of a country needs to develop and strengthen educational policy and quality as well as to ensure that everyone has equal access to basic education. The improvement of access and quality of education in the world is becoming as an essential factor in development, whereas the basic education (primary school), is acknowledged as a foundation of the higher educational development for every country. To fulfill this goal, governments introduce several policies and procedures; however, it requires some reforms and participation from the politician, policymakers, and other stakeholders to re-examine educational policy so that it can lead to multiplication and betterment of the reforms. Educational reforms actually focus on accountability. A positive educational development and reform is very challenging and needs more effort and strategy on how to use and utilize the resources effectively as such it can achie...
发表评论
阅读全文