Malnutrition, Dysphagia, Sarcopenia and Weakness in the Older Population: A Retrospective Review to Enlighten Future Directions for Health System Best Practices

This study utilized the National Hospital Discharge Survey of 2008 from the National Center of Health Statistics as secondary data to examine the associations amongst these four variables as well as possible correlations with age, days of care in the acute care hospital setting and frequency of rehabilitative and nutritional interventions received by these patients. Out of 165,630 cases, a sample size of 59,029 cases ages 65 and above were filtered by the researchers for desired diagnoses and procedure codes. After this, all neurological diagnoses were filtered and excluded by the researchers, resulting in 2458 cases. Using the Chi square test of independence, findings revealed significant associations between the variables of malnutrition and dysphagia ( χ2 (1)  = 1882.618, p = 0.001), dysphagia and weakness (χ2 (1)  = 21.069, p = 0.001) and malnutrition weakness (χ2 (1)  = 88.434, p = 0.001). The point biserial correlation coefficient was calculated to examine possible associations between these four conditions and age as well as days of care. A significant negative correlation was found between malnutrition and age (rpb (2456) = − 0.043, p = 0. 05). In addition, days of care were significantly correlated with malnutrition (r(2456) = 0.138, p = 0.001) and inversely significantly correlated with dysphagia (r(2456) = − 110, p = 0.001), weakness (r(2456) = − 0.060, p = 0.001) and sarcopenia (r(2456) = â...
Source: Dysphagia - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research