Nutritional Risk Factors Model of Community-Dwelling Older People in Poland-Pilot Study

Nutritional risk factors are country-specific and change over time, requiring systematic verification.

The study was designed to develop a nutritional risk factors model for seniors living in a Polish community.

The pilot study was conducted in 2022 and 2023 among 301 people aged 60 and older in the Lower Silesia region of Poland. The questionnaire contained 107 test items describing dietary problems rated on a five-point Likert scale. The pre-study concerned understanding of the test items, rating the reproducibility (kappa statistic) and reliability of the scale (α-Cronbach coefficient). The factor structure of the model was developed using structural equation modelling (SEM) in the program R (version 4.3.2.). An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) extracted the three-factor model.

The factors were described as unhealthy eating (eight test items), irregularities related to meals (four test items), and perception of body weight (four test items). The model was verified using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The model's acceptability was confirmed based on data matching indexes, convergent accuracy, differential accuracy, and measurement reliability. There was variation in the identified nutritional risk factors by gender, education, social activity, and family relationships.

Focusing on irregularities in nutrition and perception of body weight as nutritional risk factors reveals a very narrow perspective in diagnosing nutritional risk, thus further testing of the model, in a representative group of older people in Poland and other countries, is necessary to confirm the results obtained.