The Comparison between Residents' Health Status for Those Who Use N-G or PEG Feeding in the Long-Term Care Facilities

Purpose:  

The Purpose of this study was to compare the differences of residents’ health status between the use of PEG and N-G in long term care facilities. 

Methods:  

The cross-sectional design was used in this study to survey 1,500 residents from 32 long term care facilities in the Greater Taipei, Taiwan between May to July in 2012. 

 Results:  

The mean age for total subjects was 80.25 years old. The prevalence rate of the use of enteral nutrition support was 39.7%(n=546). Among 1,500 study subjects, 546 of them use feeding tubes and the percentage of N-G and PEG use was 92.1% and 7.9%, respectively. And those who choose PEG, they have used N-G tube for about 56 months before they decide to choose PEG. The following variables were significantly different between residents of use N-G feeding tubes and PEG: upper arms power, the time period of use N-G feeding tube . Results of this study showed that subjects who were have stronger upper arm power (χ2=13.97, P=.003),do not have diabetes mellitus with complication(χ²=5.553, P=.009), longer use N-G tube time (t=-3.2, P=.001), and more physical constrain(χ2=5.965, P=.015) were more likely to choose PEG.

Conclusion:

 The percentage of the use of PEG tubes for residents’ who live in long term-care facilities is still few. For those who choose PEG have used N-G for a long time and they have been suffered from deterioration of health status for many conditions, such as complications from medical diseases and physical constrain. The possible reason why PEG uses have a stronger upper arms power than the N-G uses maybe because their stronger upper arm power for them easily remove their N-G tubes and make their families or caregivers to choose PEG use for them.