Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA)

Download or read book Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) written by Bruno J. Vellas and published by Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first of a new series which will present the proceedings of the newly established Nestlé Nutrition Workshop Series: Clinical & Performance Programme aimed at adult nutrition. Undernutrition is a common phenomenon in elderly people, and malnutrition reaches significant levels in those being in hospital, nursing homes or home care programs. Consequences of malnutrition often go unrecognised owing to the lack of specific validated instruments to assess nutritional status in frail elderly persons. The Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) provides a single, rapid assessment of nutritional status in the elderly of different degrees of independence, allowing the prevalence of protein-energy malnutrition to be determined and to evaluate the efficacy of nutritional intervention and strategies. Easy, quick and economical to perform, it enables staff to check the nutritional status of elderly people when they enter hospitals or institutions and to monitor changes occurring during their stay. Moreover, the MNA is predictive of the cost of care and length of stay in hospital. This publication will be of immense assistance to heads of geriatric teaching units, teachers in nutrition, clinicians general practitioners and dieticians, enabling them to better detect, recognise and start treatment of malnutrition in the elderly.