Optimal nutritional status is essential for maintenance and promotion of health, independence, and quality of life. Nutritional status has been found to be the most important predictor of total number of visits by elders to the health care system. Malnourished elders often get into a cycle of progressive clinical deterioration and it appears to be a rapid and hard-to-reverse process. Among the elderly population, the community-dwelling, physically frail elders may be most vulnerable to unrecognized malnutrition. However, much research performed to date has focused on either hospitalized elders or institutional elders. Given that 95 percent of elders live in communities and 10-51 percent are malnourished, a study focusing on nutritional status of community-dwelling elders and its predictive factors is long overdue.
The aims of the study are to evaluate 1) the nutritional status of community-dwelling elders on a population-based sample, 2) the importance of selected factors (e.g. demographics, number of chronic illnesses, functional status, oral health, polypharmacy, presence of social support, loneliness, and depression) in predicting nutritional status of community-dwelling elders, and 3) the Roy Adaptation Model based theory of nutritional status in community-dwelling elders. Data will be collected from 240 senior residents who live in an inner-city public housing complex in a northeast city. Various instruments, including Comorbidity Checklist, Brief Oral Health Status Examination, Geriatric Depression Scale, Social Support Questionnaire-Short Form, Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, Enforced Social Dependency Scale, and Mini-Nutritional Assessment will be used to collect the data.
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