00:00 What exactly is disease-related malnutrition? Unlike social-related malnutrition, which
00:06 can be caused by factors such as poverty or lack of awareness when it comes to eating,
00:11 disease-related malnutrition is triggered by illnesses like cancer, cystic fibrosis
00:15 or COPD, for example, and as a result it has a negative impact on the patient's ability
00:20 to reach the right level of nutrition. Here is Programme Director at Future Health, Richard
00:25 Sloggatt, to explain that a little more.
00:28 This might be people who have undergone cancer treatment or have a stroke or have respiratory
00:32 challenges. What you find with people who go through those sorts of treatments is that
00:37 their appetite and ability to feed themselves is reduced and therefore they're not necessarily
00:40 able to take on the amount of food and calories that they need and as a result they lose weight
00:45 and then their ability to recover from treatment is reduced.
00:49 A new report has highlighted that the number of recorded malnutrition-related NHS hospital
00:54 admissions has nearly tripled since 2010 and with 2.9 million people suffering from malnutrition
01:00 in England, it's thought the total cost of hospitals battling this illness is over £22
01:05 billion. Disease-related malnutrition is projected to cost an extra £4 billion by 2025, should
01:11 no action be taken.
01:12 The thing that we're really calling for is better screening of patients, whether that's
01:17 in the community, so being able to identify people who might be at risk of this, who are
01:21 going through treatment and are able to be identified earlier so they can get the support
01:26 that they need and also people screened when they go into care settings, so whether they're
01:30 going into hospital, being screened as they are admitted, so being able to identify this
01:34 person might be more at risk so we need to give them the right nutritional support and
01:38 the right nutritional plan or care homes and older people where malnutrition is a larger
01:42 problem so people when they're admitted to care homes should be given a screen or an
01:46 assessment of their risk of malnutrition. If we were able to do better screening, we
01:50 could probably get people the better support and help and nutrition that they need so that
01:54 then there would be less cost and less admissions and less impact on health and social care.
02:02 Currently only 2% of people admitted to hospital with malnutrition are receiving a diagnosis
02:07 with earlier identification of the disease, which is key to reducing stays in NHS wards.
02:14 So I think one of the things that we're seeing obviously with an ageing population and malnutrition
02:18 is that obviously your propensity for certain diseases goes up as you get up, as you get
02:24 older, so if you think about things like dementia for example being a sort of typical one. So
02:27 as our population ages and we all get older, the amount of disease is going to increase
02:33 and therefore the amount of malnutrition related to that will also increase. So one of the
02:37 key things is a loss, so it's not only your overall BMI figure, which I think the clinical
02:41 guidelines say it'd be 18.5, so that's obviously very low, but also if you've lost 10% of your
02:46 body weight in the last three to six months and you're going through a treatment course
02:50 of say cancer or something like that, that would also be a warning sign. Other warning
02:54 signs are loss of appetite is a key thing, if that is an ongoing challenge and you're
03:00 losing weight then you are more at risk of death.
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