Investigation of the knowledge, awareness and approaches of family physicians working in Ankara about the malnutrition in the elderly people

Malnutrition is more common in the elderly than in younger adults and is usually severe when diagnosed which means increased morbidity, even mortality, prolongation of treatment process, and serious economic effects on country. The aim of this study is to evaluate the knowledge, awareness and attitude of the family physicians to elderly malnutrition, whom reach society more easily and more rapidly and communicate more often, in order to decrease the morbidity and mortality by recognizing the malnutrition earlier. Family physicians who work in family health centers affiliated to City Health Directorate of Ankara, were included in the study. Between December 2018 and February 2019, 500 family physicians were eligible, 240 of them agreed to participate in the study and those who did not respond more than 10% of the questions were excluded from the study. Totally, 226 physicians were included in the study. Fifteen percent of them were specialists. Of the total population who were 65 years and over and living in Ankara and registered to family physcians, 18.5% participated in the study. It was determined that 32.4% of the family physician experts and 42.2% of the general practitioners routinely evaluated malnutrition in the elderly population. During the evaluation of malnutrition, weight loss (84.1%) was the most questioned symptom and fatique (67.3%) was the second. It was found that 94.2% of the physicians were not using any screening tools for malnutrition and 75.2% of them were using weight loss as an anthropometric measurement method. When malnutrition was detected, 69% of family physicians were referring their patients to hospitals and 39.4% of them were proposing diet recommendations. Only 17.7% of the physicians were evaluating sarcopenia and the middle upper middle arm circumference measurement was the most preferred parameter by 60%. It was observed that 10.2% of the physicians had nursing home patients in their registered population. However, the rate of malnutrition and sarcopenia evaluation were not different between family physicians with and without having nursing home patients (p> 0.05). Keywords: Geriatrics, malnutrition, awareness, family physicians