When it comes to analyzing artificial nutrition impact on
outcomes of patients with dementia, studies dealt mainly with
survival, nutritional status improvement and enteral feeding
complications, as aspiration pneumonia, tube displacement
and number of hospital readmissions and pressure ulcers. As
previously discussed the absence of analysis of gastric stasis,
late use of enteral feeding and refeeding syndrome may impose
some bias to the results found until the present days.
the exposed cohort, non-exposed cohort selection, exposure
ascertainment and demonstration that the outcome of interest
was not present at start of study), 2) cohorts comparability
on the basis of design or analysis, and 3) outcome (including
outcome assessment, whether follow-up was long enough
for outcome and cohort follow-up adequacy) (16). A total of
9 stars could be attributed to the studies; if they counted for
more than 6 stars, they were considered to be good quality (17).
Table 1 presents the methodological quality assessment of the
considered articles; one may conclude that 78% (7 in 9) of the
publications presented a satisfactory evaluation.