The Association between Nutritional Status Using the Mini Nutritional Assessment and the Severity of Pressure Ulcer in Elderly Hospitalized Patients at King Abdul-Aziz Medical City in Riyadh

Abstract

Introduction: Pressure Ulcer (PU) is a localized injury to the skin and/or underlying tissue. Malnutrition correlates with PU and is one of the main factors for PU development. Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) has been designed and validated by previous workers to provide a single, rapid assessment of nutritional status in elderly patients, which classified patients into normal nutritional status, at risk of malnutrition, or malnourished. Objectives: Investigate the relationship between nutritional status and PU and the possibility of using the MNA to predict pressure ulcer outcomes. The main aim is to investigate the relationship between nutritional status using MNA and PU in elderly hospitalized patients at King Abdul-Aziz Medical City in Riyadh (KAMC). Methods: The study is a cross sectional study using pre-post test which included thirty five elderly patients newly diagnosed with PU admitted at KAMC. Nutritional status and PU was assessed at baseline and after two months at the end. Anthropometric measurements were taken and blood samples collected to analyze albumin, blood urea nitrogen (BUN), creatinine, before and after two months. Results: The results showed that 88.6% of PU patients were malnourished or at risk of malnutrition at baseline using the MNA test, and there was a reduction in the MNA score with the severity of PU. The MNA score was significantly increased at post study, and 54.3% of the subjects were healed completely from PU at the end. The results showed that all patients classified as normal nutritional status were completely healed from PU, 79% of at risk of malnutrition were completely healed, while only 24% of malnourished were completely healed. The result showed that there was a significant negative correlation between MNA score and age. There were significant positive correlations between MNA score and BMI, CC, MAC and albumin at baseline. Conclusion: To conclude, the results indicated that the severity of PU in elderly subjects is affected by nutritional status using MNA score. Thus, optimizing diet may help in treating and reducing the severity of PU in elderly subjects. This should be an integral part of any PU management.