The following is a summary of “Poor nutritional status is associated with the severity of omicron infection in the older adults,” published in the January 2024 issue of Infectious Disease by Gu et al.
While Omicron dominates global Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), studies on its impact on the senior population’s nutritional status remain scarce.
Researchers conducted a retrospective study to map the prevalence of poor nutrition in Omicron-infected seniors and delve into its potential link to infection severity.
They conducted a cross-sectional study, categorizing patients into two groups based on clinical symptoms: mild and moderate to severe. Upon admission, the Mini Nutritional Assessment short-form (MNA-SF) was conducted, defining poor nutritional status as an MNA-SF score of 0–11. Inflammatory markers, including neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet-lymphocyte ratio (PLR), and systemic inflammatory index (SII), were calculated and compared between the two groups.
The results showed 324 patients participated, with a median (IQR) age of 73 (17) years. Among them, 241 cases were mild, and 83 were moderate to severe at diagnosis, indicating that 54.3% had poor nutritional status. Patients with poor nutritional status were older (P<0.001), less vaccinated (P<0.001), with prolonged virus shedding (P=0.022), more comorbidities (≥2) (P=0.004), and higher NLR (P<0.001), PLR (P<0.001), and SII values (P=0.012). Vaccination, OR CT value, and female gender showed a negative association with the likelihood of moderate to severe infection. Each 1-score increase in MNA-SF reduced the odds ratio of moderate to severe infection by 14.8% [aOR, 0.852; 95% CI: 0.734–0.988; P=0.034].
The results showed poor nutrition emerged as a significant risk factor for moderate-to-severe Omicron infections in older adults.
Source: bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-023-08959-6