Nutritional status and epidemiological profile of elderly people

We intended to identify and evaluate the association between the socio-demographic and epidemiological characteristics of elderly people with their nutritional characteristics. This is a transversal study PMTI (from the Portuguese name of « Programa Municipal da Terceira Idade »), conducted at Viçosa, MG, Brazil. We analyzed 93 records of elderly people registered since 2006 and who underwent nutritional care. After having analyzed the questionnaire, we performed the descriptive and association analyses in the Epi Info (version 6.04) and Minitab softwares. Of the 93 analyzed records, most elderly people were women (80.4%), with an average of 72 years of age, of which 13.0% were long-lived people. The mean body mass index (BMI) was 27.4kg/m(2), and 50.5% were overweight. We have found 26.8% elderly patients with hypertension, and 31.6% took antihypertensives. Elderly patients who were overweight are 4.54 times more likely to have arterial hypertension (odds ratio (OR)=4.54; 95% confidence interval (CI)=1.2-2.45). Only 7.5% smoked, 30.1% were alcoholics and 60.2% made physical activities. Inadequacies were found regarding the servings of fruits, dairy products, vegetables and sugars consumed. However, the servings of cereals, leguminous, meat and fat consumed were appropriate. This study showed that the nutritional diagnosis and the epidemiological and socio-demographic studies are critical tools to understand this population group, in addition to being important to the planning of health actions.