Association of Dietary Patterns and Frailty in Elderly: Data From the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2014–2018

Abstract

ObjectivesProper nutrition is a modifiable factor in preventing frailty, a major problem in aging. This study aimed to investigate the association between dietary patterns and frailty and to identify dietary patterns and food variety. MethodsThe cross-sectional data from the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) of 2014–2018 were used. A total of 4,632 subjects aged 65 years or older were finally included in the analysis. Frailty was defined as having three or more of the following five criteria including unintentional weight loss, weakness, waking difficulties, exhaustion and low physical activity. Pre-frail was defined as having one or two criteria. Robust was defined as having none of the criteria. The dietary pattern was derived using factor analysis with the FACTOR procedure and VARIMAX rotation function that maintains uncorrelated factors and increases interpretability. The food variety score (FVS) was defined as the number of food items consumed by each subject during the last 24 h. ResultsHigh food variety score showed significantly low odds ratio (OR) for frailty [OR (95% CI) = 0.44 (0.31–0.61), p-trend < 0.0001], in a multi-nominal logistic analysis. Considering the dietary patterns derived from factor analysis, the “white rice and salted vegetables” pattern was related to the lower food diversity, and the patterns of “vegetables, oil, fish” and “noodles, meat” were associated to the higher level of food diversity. Among those dietary patterns, the “vegetables, oil, and fish” pattern was significantly associated with a low risk of frailty [OR (95% CI) = 0.55 (0.40–0.75), p-trend = 0.0002]. ConclusionsIn conclusion, this study has demonstrated the relationship between dietary patterns and frailty. Also, our findings suggested that dietary patterns with high consumption of vegetables, oil, and fish was associated with high food variety that might be related to decrease the frailty. Funding SourcesThis research was supported by the BK21 FOUR (Fostering Outstanding Universities for Research) funded by the Ministry of Education (MOE, Korea) and National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF).