Abstract
Backgrounds:
All individuals with severe dementia should be offered careful hand feeding. However, under certain circumstances, people with severe dementia have a feeding tube placed. In Taiwan, tube feeding rate in demented elderly home care residents is increasing；however, the benefits of tube feeding in this population remain unknown. We compared the clinical prognosis and mortality of elderly patients with severe dementia receiving nasogastric tube feeding (NGF) or assisted hand feeding (AHF).
Methods:
This retrospective longitudinal study enrolled 169 participants over 60 years of age in the setting of in-home healthcare between January 1 and December 31, 2017. All subjects with documented severe dementia and complete functional dependence suffered from difficulty in oral intake and required either AHF or NGF. Data were collected from both groups to analyze pneumonia, hospitalization, and mortality rates.
Results:
A total of 169 subjects (56 males and 113 females, aged 85.9 ± 7.5 years) were analyzed. Of note, 39 required AHF and 130 NGF. All subjects were in a bedridden status；129 (76.3%) showed Barthel index < 10. Pneumonia risk was higher in the NGF group (47.7%) than in the AHF group (25.6%, p = 0.015). After adjusting for multiple factors in the regression model, the risk of pneumonia showed no significant difference in both groups (aOR = 2.20, 95% CI 0.92–5.30). One-year mortality rates in the AHF and NGF groups were 7.7% and 14.6%, respectively, and no significant difference was observed after adjustment with logistic regression (aOR = 2.38, 95% CI 0.58–9.70). There were no significant differences in hospitalization rate and duration.
Conclusions:
For elderly patients with dementia requiring in-home healthcare, NGF is not associated with a significantly lower risk of pneumonia than AHF. Additionally, neither mortality nor hospitalization rates decreased with NGF. However, aORs with the trend of increasing risk of in the NGF group were observed in measured outcomes. Therefore, the benefits of NGF are debatable in elderly patients with severe dementia requiring in-home healthcare. Continued careful hand feeding could be an alternative to NG feeding in patients with severe dementia. Furthermore, large-scale studies on home healthcare would be required to support these results.
Oral care and prevention of pneumonia after withdrawal of nasogastric tube feeding in three elderly patients with psychiatric disorders
