Nutritional evaluation of geriatric patients with Alzheimer's disease in Southern Brazil: case-control study.

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.