A Simple Assessment of the Eating and Swallowing Functions in Elderly Patients with Pneumonia

It is important to assess the eating and swallowing functions of elderly people because they often develop aspiration pneumonia due to dysphagia. The most reliable modalities for assessing the eating and swallowing functions are videofluoroscopic examinations and videoendoscopic evaluations; however, these diagnostic modalities often cannot be performed in elderly people. Therefore, we established the Assessment of Swallowing Ability for Pneumonia (ASAP), which is an assessment of eating and swallowing functions in elderly patients with pneumonia that can be conducted by all health care professionals, and examined the usefulness thereof. The subjects included 130 patients with pneumonia (58 males, 72 females, average age: 82.2 ± 13.0) who had been admitted to the internal medicine department at our hospital between January 2016 and June 2016. The coefficient of correlation between ASAP and the Mann Assessment of Swallowing Ability (MASA) was 0.97, indicating a strong correlation, and the area under the curves (AUC) between the ASAP and the degrees of severity were 0.98, 0.95, and 0.94, respectively. We suggest that ASAP can be useful as a modality for assessing the eating and swallowing functions in elderly patients with pneumonia.