Elsevier

Clinical Nutrition

Volume 41, Issue 12, December 2022, Pages 3100-3105
Clinical Nutrition

Covid-19
Region-specific COVID-19 risk scores and nutritional status of a high-risk population based on individual vulnerability assessment in the national survey data

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clnu.2021.02.019Get rights and content

Summary

Background & aims

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing pandemic outbreak leading to more than 1 million deaths worldwide as reported in 2020. Several risk assessment tools, including individual vulnerability to COVID-19, have been developed. The present study aimed to characterize a high-risk population using such a tool and examine risk factors and nutritional status in the national survey data and estimate the region-specific population size.

Methods

The study included 17,540 Korean adults who participated in the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES). The risk scores for individual vulnerability to COVID-19 were calculated based on age, sex, smoking status, and comorbidities, and a high-risk population was defined as having risk scores ≥11. Nutritional status was compared between the high-risk population and the remaining participants in the KNHANES data. The region-specific population size was estimated using national statistics.

Results

The proportion of the high-risk population was estimated to be 10.5%, which corresponds to approximately 4.6 million adults in South Korea. About 20% of them had inadequate intake of all of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, and C below the estimated average requirement. The high-risk population showed 1.65 [95% confidence interval: 1.39, 1.96] higher odds of inadequate intake of multiple vitamins than the remaining participants. In the ecological analysis, the region-specific numbers of the high-risk population correlated significantly with the actual numbers of deaths due to COVID-19 (P value = 0.013).

Conclusions

These results suggest that individuals vulnerable to COVID-19, in particular those are living in densely populated regions, should pay particular attention to the protection against this pandemic and have adequate nutritional status, which may support optimal immune function.

Keywords

COVID-19
Risk assessment
Death
Nutritional status
National survey

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