Background: Nutrition has an important role in promoting health and disease prevention. Many elderly are already malnourished before hospitalization. Further deterioration can occur during hospitalization. malnutrition can affect the efficiency of several treatments, results in longer hospital stay and increased mortality. Therefore , assessment of patient function is as important as nutritional status as it can compromise patient quality of life and affect patient outcome. So, the aim of the current study is to determine the relationship between prehospitalization function and nutritional state and hospital outcome among hospitalized Egyptian septuagenarians (aged 70 years and above).
Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted included 100 patients 70 years and above both males and females admitted to internal ward of geriatric hospital in Ain Shams university hospitals. Data collection included demographic and clinical characteristics, functional assessment using ADL, nutritional assessment by MNA-SF and GNRI
Results: the MNA-SF had the highest diagnostic performance as the area under the curve was 0.832 and the cut off point was ≤ 8 with a significant P value (<0.001), with sensitivity 86.7% and specificity 69.4%. GNRI has the least diagnostic performance with area under the curve 0.506 and the cut off point 100. Independent variables affecting mortality were ADL= 0 and MNA-SF ≤ 8.
Conclusion: the study provides evidence supporting the predictive utility of MNA and ADL in identifying poor outcomes among hospitalized elderly patients.