Prevalence of Malnutrition in Community-Dwelling Egyptian Elderly

This study aimed to assess Egyptian elder's nutritional status and determined effect of chronic diseases on elder's nutritional status. Tools of the study; (1) Socio-demographic & medical data, (2) assessment of the top ten chronic diseases among Egyptian elders, and (3) Mini-Nutritional Assessment (MNA®) screening tool. It's a prospective, cross-sectional study. The studied sample was 345 Egyptian elders. According sample age (M± SD = 68.06 ± 7.708). They live in the Beni-Suef governorate. The results mentioned that thirty-nine percent of subjects were less than 75Yrs, sixty-two had one chronic disease or more. Twenty percent had hypertension while 0.6% had Alzheimer's disease. The study shows more than one-third (39.1%) of elders were at risk of malnutrition while about one-quarter (22.9%) were malnourished. There aren't statistically significant differences between age and nutritional status (P-Value ≤ 0.005). While there is a positive relationship between the presence of chronic diseases in Egyptian elders and their risk of malnutrition with statistically significant differences (P-Value ≤ 0.005). Egyptian elderly had unsatisfactory nutritional status, they need an educational program about therapeutic nutrition according to their health conditions