Home-made oral supplement as nutritional support of old nursing home residents, who are undernourished or at risk of undernutrition based on the MNA. A pilot trial. Mini Nutritional Assessment.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied the intervention named in the title in this randomized controlled trial publication.

The aim of this pilot study was to examine the effect of a home-made oral supplement on body weight and energy intake of old people residing in a nursing home.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

Sixty-six old (65+ years) nursing home residents were included and divided into three classes according to their Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) scores.

Participants who scored 17-23.5 MNA points (at risk of undernutrition) and had a BMI <24 kg/m2 were randomly allocated (block randomization) to two groups: B and C.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and pilot study.

Because people in this study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger study would be practical.

Participants with <17 MNA-points (undernourished) were allocated to group A.

The participants allocated to groups A and B received a home-made oral supplement every evening for two consecutive months.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Dietary Supplements, Nursing Homes, Nutritional Support, Pilot Projects, Prevalence, Protein-Energy Malnutrition and Risk Factors.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and pilot study.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 5 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2002 (Aging clinical and experimental research), a journal based in Germany.

More context: all human trials.