Nutritional assessment of hiv positive individuals

There is a strong relationship between nutrition and illness. Good nutrition plays a vital role for the immune system. The body's components are the elements which people consume from foods. So we can say that the person should have an adequate and balanced diet. The patient during the illness has a catabolic process which increases the both energy and other nutrient needs. During this catabolic process, the protein destruction commonly occurs. The acute phase of HIV and the stage of AIDS, frequency of malnutrition is highly common. This is important that the nutritional support is vital for the HIV positive person while taking medical therapy. Both ART and HAART provide longer life to the HIV positive individuals. Beside of the malnutrition, these two therapies causes some other nutritional problems. The nutritional problems can be body fat distribution disorder based such as lipodystrophy or other metabolic syndromes. In this thesis study, general health status, being HIV positive and medical therapy process, the drugs and side effects are questioned. Also the 24 hour recall survey is applied. With this survey, the nutritional habits are determined. BMI is calculated and compared to nutritional status. As a result; it is obtained that HIV-positive individuals don't supply the required amount of energy to take daily, across to this, the BMI results showed normal values. The causes of this situation can be the low metabolic rate, sedentary life or psychological status of the HIV positive individuals. More than half of the population (51%) were found to use nutritional supplements. Also revealed that the population has low levels of appetite. More than half the population (55,1%) say that there are no digestive problems in their digestive systems, but the other part of the population has digestive system problems. Key words: HIV, nutrition, malnutrition