Trabajo Original

Nutritional evaluation of geriatric patients with alzheimer’s disease in southern brazil: case-control study

---

Flávia Ivanski, Lizziane De Paula Nascimento, Bárbara Luisa Fermino, Juliana Sartori Bonini, Weber Cláudio Francisco Nunes Da Silva, Juliana Maria Silva Valério, Roberta Fabbri, Anne Karine Bosetto, Elizama Gregório

Introduction: elderly’s malnutrition is linked, among other factors, to chronic-degenerative diseases, requiring an improvement in the clinical evaluation of nutritional status of this population. Studies have tried to find out new tools to assess aged-people nutritional status. One of most used scales to investigate nutritional status on geriatric patients is the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA).Objective: the present study aims to evaluate nutritional status of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients, by comparison with a control group, via Mini Nutritional Assessment.Methods: a cross-sectional study, which includes 35 alzheimer’s old-people and 43 control old-people, was performed evaluating nutritional status with MNA.Results: total score of MNA in the alzheimer group shows that 71.42% were in malnutrition risk, 14.28% were malnourished and 14.25% presented normal nutritional status. In addition, in the control group 79.06% of patients (n = 34) were classified as having normal nutritional status and 20.93% (n = 9), as being at risk of malnutrition.Conclusion: results reinforce the purpose that MNA can be used as a proper instrument to evaluate nutritional status in elderly, mainly in AD, because measuring risk and nutritional status of this population is indispensable.

Palabras Clave:

Artículos más populares