Medicina clinica
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The chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a highly undiagnosed disease. The use of short screening questionnaires designed to detect chronic airflow obstruction may help to the early diagnosis of COPD. ⋯ The COPD-PS questionnaire demonstrated good psychometric properties. A cut off score of 4 has excellent predictive value. A ratio of 0.75 in the FEV(1)/FEV(6) provides an excellent correlation with the ratio FEV(1)/FVC and is useful for the identification of individuals with chronic airflow obstruction.
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Over the past years, several studies have examined the prevalence of malnutrition. The purpose of the present systematic literature review is to provide an overview of the current knowledge about the nutritional situation of elderly. Based on a literature research, studies with information about the prevalence of malnutrition published between 1995 and 2011 were considered. ⋯ Prevalence rates of malnutrition were highest in studies with a high proportion of patient who were severely disabled, had hip fracture or swallowing problems. It can be concluded that malnutrition is generally widespread and is highly variable, according to parameters used for nutritional assessment, health related problems or the population under study. Future studies should use standardized nutritional assessment tools in order to improve the prognosis of malnutrition in the elderly and achieve better comparability of study results.