General practitioner and public health nurse views of nutritional risk factors in the elderly

A number of risk factors for malnutrition in the elderly have been identified, but their relative importance has yet to be established. General practitioners and public health nurses were interviewed to elicit the relative weights placed on 6 major risk factors when assessing nutritional risk in the elderly (living alone, recent bereavement, denture problems, mobility problems, psychiatric morbidity and multiple medication use). Participants rated risk for 35 hypothetical cases, described by their status on the 6 risk factors. Multiple regression models of these judgments revealed a consistently high weight for psychiatric morbidity compared to the other factors. Little group variation in diagnostic policies was observed between general practitioners and public health nurses or by case gender. These policies may reflect the perception that psychiatric problems pervade many areas of life functioning related to nutritional intake and are therefore more likely to cause malnutrition than other, more specific risk factors.