Geriatric Nutrition: Elderly at Risk of Malnutrition in Old Age Homes
Keywords:
Elderly, Geriatric, Old age, Malnutrition, functional ability, dependencyAbstract
Background: Nutrition influences the health and functional ability. Older persons are particularly vulnerable to malnutrition, which will affect their health and functional ability. Also, Nutritional problems are the root cause of the major communicable and non – communicable diseases.
Objectives: The study conducted to assess the nutritional status of the elderly, to describe the functional ability of the elderly and to assess the vision, hearing and mobility of the elderly.
Methodology: A cross sectional study was carried out in the old age homes of Davangere district over a period of 1 year among 105 elderly living in the old age homes. Nutritional status was assessed using Mini Nutritional Assessment scale. Functional ability was measured by Katz Activities of Daily Living Scale.
Results: Out of 105 elderly, 61% were found to be at risk of malnutrition and 24% were malnourished. Visual impairment, hearing impairment and mobility was affected in 30.5%, 20% and 39% of the elderly respectively. There was a statistically significant association between age and Nutritional status of the elderly.
Conclusion: From our study, we conclude that Majority of the elderly were either at risk or were malnourished. Majority of the elderly had one of the functional inabilities.
References
Shivraj M et al. Study of Nutritional Status In Elderly In In-dian Population. Int J current research 2014; 6 (11): 10253 - 10257
Lahiri S, Biswas A, Santra S. Lahiri,SK. Assessment of nutri-tional status among elderly population in a rural area of West Bengal, India. Int J Med Sci Public Health 2015;4:569-572
Dey AB. Introduction; Hand Book on Health Care of Elder-ly. A Manual for Trainers of Physicians in Primary and Sec-ondary Health Care Facilities, 1st ed., WHO, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, AIIMS: 11-16.
Wiener JM, Hanley RJ, Clark R, Van Nostrand JF. Measur-ing the activities of daily living: Comparisons across na-tional surveys; 1990 [cited 2013 Oct 18]. Available from: http://aspe.hhs.gov/daltcp/reports/meacmpes.pdf
Mini Nutritional Assessment. Available from: http://www. mna-elderly.com/forms/mini/mna_mini_ english.pdf
Kaiser MJ, Bauer JM, Ramsch C, et al. Validation of the Mini Nutritional Assessment Short-Form (MNA®-SF): A practical tool for identification of nutritional status. J Nutr Health Aging 2009; 13:782-788.
Shelkey M, Wallace M. Katz Index of Independence in Ac-tivities of Daily Living (ADL). Available from http:// con-sultgerirn.org/uploads/File/trythis/try_this_2.pdf
Tiwari S, sinha AK, Patwardhan K, Gehlot S, Gambhir IS, Mohapatra SC. Prevalence of health problems among elder-ly: A study in a rural population of Varanasi. Indian J.Prev.Soc.Med. 2010; 41 (3 & 4): 226 – 230
All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Evaluation of health status and health needs of old age home residents and es-tablishment of minimum standards of health services in long stay institutions in India, 2006-07. New Delhi: All India Institute of Medical Sciences; 2007:46-57
Park K: Textbook of Preventive and Social Medicine. Ba-narasidas Bhanot Publication, 22th edition, 2012: 549.
Vedantam A, Subramanian V, Rao N V, John KR. Malnutri-tion in free-living elderly in rural south India: prevalence and risk factors. Public Health Nutr 2010;13(9):1328–32.
Baweja, S., Agarwal, H., Mathur, A., Haldiya, K. R. and Ma-thur, A. Assessment of Nutritional Status and Related Risk Factors in Community Dwelling Elderly Rajasthan. J. Ind. Acad. Geriatr., 2008. 4:5-13.
Kansal D, Baliga SS, Kruthika K, Mallapur MD. Nutritional assessment among elderly population of rural Belagavi: a cross-sectional study. Int J Med Sci Public Health 2016; 5
Sharma S, Thakur M, Kaur S. Health Problems and Treat-ment Seeking Behaviour among Elderly. HelpAge India-Research & Development Journal 2012; 18(2): 21 – 27
Majra JP, Gur A. Medico social profile of the inmates of the old age homes in southern India. Middle East J Age Aging 2010; 7(3): 2
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The authors retain the copyright of their article, with first publication rights granted to Medsci Publications.
