Nutrition
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Although beriberi is considered a forgotten disease in the West, Kashmir has a rice-eating population that has beriberi in endemic proportions. Patients with a thiamine deficiency (TD) occasionally present with gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, including nausea, recurrent vomiting, loss of appetite, and abdominal discomfort. Together these often respond to thiamine, which points to gastric beriberi. ⋯ Gastric beriberi is a rare presentation of TD that can lead to severe GI symptoms and lactic acidosis. Given the rapid response to thiamine, it is the standard-of-care treatment in such cases. Thus, clinicians should suspect TD when patients present with either mild or moderate-to-severe GI symptoms and raised blood lactate.
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It is likely that the number of older adults who eat alone has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Older adults who eat alone tend to experience weight fluctuations. Weight loss and underweight in older adults cause health problems. The study objective was to longitudinally investigate the association between changes in eating alone or with others and body weight status in older adults. ⋯ These findings suggest that measures to prevent weight loss in older adults who eat alone are particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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This study aimed to evaluate sex differences in the relationships of food security level with skeletal muscle mass and handgrip strength. ⋯ Low food security was associated with lower muscle mass and strength in men aged <60 y and weaker muscle strength in men aged ≥60 y and women of all ages. These results suggest sex differences in the relationships of food security with muscle mass and strength in individuals aged <60 y.
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Review
Assessment of body composition: Intrinsic methodological limitations and statistical pitfalls.
Evaluation of body composition (BC) is crucial for an adequate assessment of nutritional status and its alterations, to ensure the optimal tailoring of nutritional therapies during several pathologic conditions. The need for feasible and reliable methods for BC measurement, which could be applied either in healthcare across the lifespan as well as in clinical research and epidemiologic studies, has led to the development of various techniques. Unfortunately, they have not always produced equivalent results due to the fact that they are based on completely different principles or suffer intrinsic biases related to specific conditions. ⋯ Finally, the need to compare the data obtained by new techniques to a reference standard has produced a further bias, due to a systematic misinterpretation of the statistical methods in the attempt to correlate the various techniques. In this context, the most used statistical methods for the comparison between different techniques have been Pearson's correlation test, the more recent intraclass correlation coefficient, Lin's concordance correlation coefficient method, and the Bland-Altman analysis. The aim of this review was to offer a summary of the methods that are mostly used in clinical practice to measure BC with the intent to give appropriate suggestions when statistical methods are used to interpret data, and underline pitfalls and limitations.