Oral Health Status in the Iranian Elderly: The Role of Nutrition Status and Health Literacy

Oral health plays an important role in determining food intake patterns, meeting nutritional needs, and consequently keeping the health of the elderly and their quality of life. Health literacy is also one of the biggest determinants that significantly impacts disease prevention in the elderly.

This study aimed to determine oral health status and the relationship between health literacy and nutritional status in the elderly referring to health centers in Tabriz City, Iran.

This research is a cross-sectional analytical study performed on 300 older people in Tabriz in 2020. Data collection tools included the geriatric oral health assessment index, seniors in the community: risk evaluation for eating and nutrition, health literacy for Iranian adults, and demographic information questionnaire. To analyze the data, descriptive statistics were used to sort out the data. The Shapiro-Wilk test was used to check the data normality, and then simple and multiple linear regression analyses were performed to evaluate the relationship between variables and control the effect of intervening variables. The level of significance in this study was considered less than 0.05.

The Mean±SD age of the elderly was 69.7±6.7 years. The number of men and women participating in this study was equal. A total of 257 people (85.7%) were married. The results showed that the oral health status of 51% of the elderly was below mean, 65.33% of the elderly were illiterate, and 69.33% were severely malnourished. Based on the results of multiple regression, the nutritional status of the individuals was a predictor of the oral health score of the elderly (Β=-13.5, 95% CI; -11.3, -15.69, P=0.001). So, people with malnutrition, mildly malnourished, and severely malnourished had lower oral health scores than healthy individuals with the control of the other variables. The R2 value in this study was 0.59.

According to the study results and the relationship between malnutrition and oral health, it is necessary to conduct studies on the factors affecting malnutrition in the elderly by intervening on the factors affecting malnutrition, changing the oral health status of the elderly, and improving their quality of life.