Journal of the American Medical Directors Association
Original StudyThe Impact of Dysphagia on Mortality of Nursing Home Residents: Results From the nutritionDay Project
Section snippets
Methods
The nutritionDay project evaluates the nutritional situation of hospital patients and nursing home residents in the form of an annual, voluntary 1-day cross-sectional survey. The survey was first performed in hospitals.10, 11 In 2007, the project was extended to nursing homes.12 Outcome data are obtained after 30 days in hospital patients and after 6 months in nursing home residents. The following analysis is based on the complete data set of nutritionDay in nursing homes obtained from 2007 to
Results
A total of 191 nursing homes with 26,651 nursing home residents from 14 countries participated in the survey between 2007 and 2012. After exclusion of residents with incomplete data, 10,185 data sets could be analyzed. Reasons for exclusion were missing outcome data (n = 12,656), age <65 years (n = 1976), missing or implausible anthropometric data (n = 914), probable repeaters (n = 807), and missing data on dysphagia (n = 113).
Mean age of the participants was 85.2 ± 8.1 years, and 78% were
Discussion
It is well known that dysphagia is highly prevalent in older subjects, particularly in nursing home residents. In fact, reported prevalence rates greatly vary because of the different definitions of dysphagia and diagnostic methods. The relatively low prevalence of 15.4% reported in this survey has to be valued as the rate of obvious, that is, symptomatic dysphagia, rather than the true prevalence. In this study, dysphagia was determined by the simple question if the resident has dysphagia or
Conclusion
In this large nutritionDay study, dysphagia was identified as an independent risk factor for 6-month mortality in nursing home residents. In particular, residents with dysphagia accompanied by weight loss are at a disproportionately high risk of mortality and should therefore receive special attention.
Acknowledgments
We like to thank all participating nursing homes for supporting the nutritionDay.
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The authors declare no conflicts of interest.