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.