Introduction:
High prevalence of malnutrition in the growing population of older adults makes nutritional screening mandatory for hospitalized elderly patients.
Objective:
Identify nutrition risk and the odds ratio of nutritional screening data of elderly (≥ 65 years old) to adult (21 to 64 years old) patients recently admitted to a tertiary hospital.
Casuistic and Methods:
We applied the Subjective Global Assessment (SGA) protocol in 2478 patients within 48 hours after admission to a public hospital. Subjects were divided into Elderly Group (n = 733) and Non-elderly Group (n = 1745). The data were submitted to Chi-Square test. The quantification of this association was measured using logistic regression models.
Results:
Elderly patients showed a high percentage of nutritional risk or mild/moderately malnourished (41 vs. 32%). The prevalence of severe malnourished was similar between the study groups (10 vs. 9%).
Results of logistic regression showed the odds ratio (OR) of elderly patients were greater for weight loss (OR=1.30), in quantity (OR=1.29) and consistency of food (OR=1.85) changes in the pattern of food intake, anorexia (OR=1.69) and dysphagia (OR=1.56), when compared to the adults. Besides that, elderly patients presented greater risk of diseases with increased metabolic demand and clinical signs of nutritional deficiencies.
Conclusions:
Prevalence of nutritional risk and malnutrition was high in the patients evaluated, and elderly subjects showed higher nutritional risk when compared to other hospitalized patients.These results can be attributed to changes in the pattern of food intake due to anorexia and dysphagia, associated with higher prevalence of diseases with increased metabolic demand.