World Journal of
Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences

ASSESSMENT OF NUTRITIONAL STATUS OF ELDERLY PEOPLES IN OLD AGE HOMES OF HOOGHLY DISTRICT, WEST BENGAL, INDIA

Subha Bose Banerjee, Tanushree Das, Nirmal Pradhan and Kuntal Gupta*

ABSTRACT

Nutrition is an important determinant of health in elderly population, where the malnutrition is associated with severe complications like decreased immunity, muscle wasting, decreased physical activities, increased risk of mortality and morbidity. The malnutrition in geriatric population is very common as because daily food consumption decreases usually with old age. So, the nutrition is the primary turning point in geriatric health and therefore nutritional screening or assessment is the key component in comprehensive geriatric evaluation. In parallel, the psychological impairment caused by depression, loneliness, insecurity, cognitive impairment and higher dependence are also to be considered as important factors of malnutrition. In consideration of the above fact, the present survey was performed from two old age homes in Hooghly District, West Bengal, India, on 50 elderly people of 60- 90 years age group for a period of three months considering both sexes irrespective of socio economic status and diseases following noninvasive questionnaire method. The present study revealed that few people (4%) were actually found to be malnourished, more than half of the population (56%) was at risk of malnutrition. Since, depression scores were also found to be significantly correlated with the nutritional status, more than half of the subjects (66%) were also found to be suffering from depression of different grades. Also the proportion of severely depressed females was found to be significantly higher than the male subjects. Therefore, early nutritional intervention should be implemented especially to those who were „malnourished? or „at risk?. So, the nutritional development would improve the depression status of the elderly people and the residents of the homes will brought to the main stream of life again.

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