Malnutrition and dehydration are relatively common in older individuals, and a simple, reliable instrument to assess nutritional and hydration status would be very helpful. Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) has been promising in this context, but there have been questions about its reliability in healthy young individuals and there are few data on elderly persons and geriatric in-hospital patients.
This study compared BIA measurements with a clinical assessment in 31 community-dwelling women and 30 female nursing-home residents. The results of the BIA measurement correlated well to some of the commonly used clinical indicators of nutritional status in hospitalised patients (weight, hand grip strength, and calf circumference). The authors then compared BIA measurements with clinical judgement of hydration status in 103 acute geriatric hospital in-patients. Clinical assessment was based on a short check-list (moisture of the tongue, skin turgor, capillary refill time, tonus of the eyeballs and, if there was a urinary catheter, colour of the urine).
These results, together with an overall clinical judgement, were translated into an analogue scale of hydration status ranging from 1 (severely dehydrated) to 5 (severely hyperhydrated), with a value of 3 being normally hydrated. Concordance between the results of clinical judgement and BIA measurements was only 43.7%. These results suggest that there is little concordance between the clinical and the bioelectrical evaluation of the hydration in geriatric in-patients. There remains, however, a need to compare BIA values with established objective markers of hydration status in this population.
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Abstract [button text=”View at PubMed” url=”http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19616321″ target=”_blank” color=”blue”][/button]
[blockquote]Malnutrition and dehydration are common in elderly. A simple, reliable instrument to assess nutritional and hydration status would be very helpful. Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) has been promising in this context, but data of elderly persons and geriatric in-hospital patients are rare. Therefore, we first compared BIA measurements (resistance, reactance, phase angle and a resulting vectorgraph) with a clinical assessment in 31 community-dwelling women and 30 female nursing-home residents. The results of the BIA measurement correlated well to weight, hand grip strength, and calf circumference. We then compared BIA measurements with clinical judgement of hydration status in 103 acute geriatric hospital in-patients. Concordance between the results of clinical judgement and BIA measurements was only 43.7%. In assessing geriatric in-patients, there is little concordance between the clinical and the bioelectrical evaluation of the hydration status.[/blockquote]