The influence of nutritional supplement drinks on providing adequate calorie and protein intake in older adults with dementia.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Dietary Proteins, published as a controlled clinical trial.

Investigate the impact of the provision of ONS on protein and energy intake from food and ability to meet protein and calorie requirements in people with dementia.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 26 participants taking part.

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

After consent by proxy was obtained, participants took part in a cross over study comparing oral intake on an intervention day to an adjacent control day.

Older adults with dementia over the age of 65 were recruited. 26 participants (aged 83.9+/-8.4years, MMSE 13.08+/-8.13) took part.

How the Study Was Run

The study occurred in Nursing homes and hospitalised settings.

Intervention (if any): On the intervention day nutritional supplement drinks were provided three times.

Supplements were removed approximately 1 hour before meals were served and weighed waste (g) was obtained.

Intake of food consumed was determined on intervention and control days using the quartile method (none, quarter, half, three quarters, all) for each meal component.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Alzheimer Disease, Dietary Proteins, Dietary Supplements, Energy Intake, Feeding Behavior, Nursing Homes and Nutritional Requirements.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a controlled clinical trial of Dietary Proteins in 26 participants.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Results are reported in around 3 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2013 (The journal of nutrition, health & aging), a journal based in France.

More context: all human trials.