RUA: Nutrition

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Nutrition

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Introduction

An individual’s nutritional status mainly results from various factors interacting at different levels (Shirakabe et al., 2018). Nevertheless, an individual’s eating pattern is an essential factor that dictates disease occurrence, particularly some chronic conditions like hypertension, cancer, stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. Again, adverse outcomes, including malnutrition, poor life quality, low birth weight, mortality, and disability, are relative to poor eating patterns. Therefore, recognizing diet’s role at the onset of disease and evaluating the nutritional status of a community, family, and individual are essential public health. In this case, nutritional assessment help to obtain information concerning the geographical distribution and prevalence of nutritional disorders in a community or a specific population group. The assessment also aids in planning corrective measures and examining the effectiveness of applied strategies simultaneously.

Article Search

Identifying recently published articles that support present nutritional status evaluation is necessary to locate essential evidence for the topic. Hence, it was imperative to determine scholarly academic sources whose publications range within the past five years to facilitate up-to-date information that applies to the paper’s focus. In this case, I used search terms “Malnutrition,” “Mini Nutritional Assessment,” and “Diets” in the NCBI and PubMed search databases. Here, I located the articles “Assessing and Evaluating Nutritional Status, Diets, and Physical Activity ” and “Evaluation of Nutritional Status of Elderly Patients Presenting to the Family Health Center” using this technique to find information that supports nutritional status assessment.

Article Findings

The findings in the articles emphasize the significance of implementing nutritional status assessments to maintain individuals’ health status. Cross-sectional research took place at a domestic health center in Turkey. The study sample consisted of 102 patients in FHC without severe dementia, communication problems, or psychiatric conditions (Nazan & Buket, 2018). Participants completed an MNA questionnaire regarding daily meal numbers, feeding mode, fluid and protein consumption, anthropometric measurements, and patients’ self-view concerning health and nutritional status. In the study, 31% of the participants had malnutrition risk, while 13% were malnourished. The findings showed that malnutrition prevalence was higher in males, and malnutrition risk increases with age in any geriatric population. Again, patients with malnutrition portrayed severe appetite loss. Generally, the study shows that the malnutrition rate increase rapidly in parallel with the global elderly growth. Hence, the article addresses the topic because the application of nutritional screening examinations for the elderly people would facilitate health measures to reduce mortality resulting from malnutrition. The reason for article selection was its use of a cross-sectional study, making it possible to analyze outcomes and findings to develop in-depth research or new theories.

Evidence for Practice

There is evidence that nutritional depletion severely affects disease progression and medical and surgical interventions for patients suffering from chronic or acute disease. Again, nutritional depletion prevalence is high in many patients groups and increases because of an aging society. Again, polypharmacy and chronic conditions are also factors that affect people’s nutritional status. In this case, the government recommends a yearly dietary evaluation to facilitate early disease detection to encourage health promotion. Additionally, the federal government updates the guidelines to facilitate adherence to nutritional intake recommendations every five years (Gallegos, 2020). The interventions entail a healthy eating pattern with limited calories, sodium, and saturated fat intake. In this case, individuals may lessen the probability of chronic diseases related to sedentary lifestyles and obesity by making daily improvements towards lifestyle choices. The concern located in the evidence is that incorporation of nutritional intervention and assessment into the standard medical practice is yet to happen.

Sharing of Evidence

The evidence from the articles would be significant to share among healthcare professionals, family members, and patients. Information sharing would be relative to the specific targeted population. Offering patients with written information would be necessary to encourage them to make long-term beneficial choices on their nutritional status. In this case, mass notification systems would be necessary to distribute educative information about nutritional status to all patients and health professionals. After sharing the evidence with the healthcare professionals, they can collaborate with peer support organizations, nonprofit community service organizations, and healthcare clinics to help community members with easy mealtime schedules, especially the elderly.

Conclusion

The studies’ findings show an increased demand for nutritional status assessment, particularly for elderly adults, as malnutrition increases with age. Again, well-focused training programs can influence communities to address various nutritional needs. In this case, patients would gain from additional clinical management relating to eating and feeding practices. Generally, research interventions that enhance proper nutrition, especially for older people, are necessary.

References

Gallegos, D. (2020). Assessing and evaluating nutritional status, diets and physical activity. In Food and Nutrition (pp. 426-450). Routledge.

Nazan, S., & Buket, K. (2018). Evaluation of nutritional status of elderly patients presenting to the Family Health Center. Pakistan journal of medical sciences, 34(2), 446.

Shirakabe, A., Hata, N., Kobayashi, N., Okazaki, H., Matsushita, M., Shibata, Y., ... & Shimizu, W. (2018). The prognostic impact of malnutrition in patients with severely decompensated acute heart failure, as assessed using the Prognostic Nutritional Index (PNI) and Controlling Nutritional Status (CONUT) score. Heart and vessels, 33(2), 134-144.

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