Nutrition AND Hydration IN Older Adults

Meet the patient

Mrs K is an 84-year-old widow admitted with a fall and a fractured neck of femur. She has lost 8 percent of her body weight in three months, her temporalis is hollow, her albumin is 28 g/L, and her MUST score is 2. The surgical team has written "diet as tolerated" and moved on. The question that decides whether she walks out of hospital is not the fracture — it is whether you notice she is starving, work out why, and refeed her without precipitating refeeding syndrome.[4][12]

Hold those three questions — is she malnourished, why, and how do I feed her safely — and the whole topic falls into place.[4]

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