Prevalence of Malnutrition in Community-Dwelling Egyptian Elderly Hefnawy Gehan Refat Mohamed1,* Assistant Professor, College of Applied Medical Science, Nursing Department, Jouf University, Saudi Arabia 1Faculty of Nursing, Geriatric Nursing Department, El-Minia University, Egypt *Corresponding Author: e-mail: gehan.hefnawy@yahoo.com, Mobile: 00966549973249
Online published on 31 March, 2020. Abstract This study aimed to assess Egyptian elder's nutritional status and determined effect of chronic diseases on elder's nutritional status. Tools of the study; (1) Socio-demographic & medical data, (2) assessment of the top ten chronic diseases among Egyptian elders, and (3) Mini-Nutritional Assessment (MNA®) screening tool. It's a prospective, cross-sectional study. The studied sample was 345 Egyptian elders. According sample age (M± SD = 68.06 ± 7.708). They live in the Beni-Suef governorate. The results mentioned that thirty-nine percent of subjects were less than 75Yrs, sixty-two had one chronic disease or more. Twenty percent had hypertension while 0.6% had Alzheimer's disease. The study shows more than one-third (39.1%) of elders were at risk of malnutrition while about one-quarter (22.9%) were malnourished. There aren't statistically significant differences between age and nutritional status (P-Value ≤ 0.005). While there is a positive relationship between the presence of chronic diseases in Egyptian elders and their risk of malnutrition with statistically significant differences (P-Value ≤ 0.005). Egyptian elderly had unsatisfactory nutritional status, they need an educational program about therapeutic nutrition according to their health conditions Top Keywords Malnutrition, Elders, Mini-Nutritional Assessment (MNA®). Top |