Nutritional Assessment of the Older Population: Practical Application and Limitation

Evaluation of nutritional status is an essential element in providing appropriate intervention strategies to achieve the highest level of health, Nutritional assessment of the older population is complicated by many factors which do not significantly affect the nutritional status in young adults, therefore, it should be considered in two ways; community-dwelling elders group and hospitalized or institutionalized elderly group. To sort out the individuals with nutritional problems in a community efficiently, nutrition screening tools must be simple, relatively inexpensive, and applicable to a large number of subjects. Combination of tools and indicators such as 24-hour food recall, body weight and height, and questionnaires on eating practices, and the presence of chronic diseases is practically applicable as basic tools of nutritional screening of older age group. However, the lack of validated screening techniques remains a barrier in improving nutrition. Validation is only limited to energy, BMI, protein intake of the older populations living in western countries. Further refinement of nutritional assessment tools is demanded to figure out whether those are practically applicable to community-living older adults in Asian Society. A careful and systematic evaluation of nutritional assessment tools should be carried out prior to implementation of stepwise nutrition service to the heterogeneous older population. For an in-depth nutritional assessment at the individual level, we need to extend research efforts to clarify the requirements of nutrients due to aging and diseases. More cost-effective method that will allow rapid analysis of survey results are needed so that information can be readily available to policymakers.