Image of male nurse pushing senior woman in a wheelchair in nursing facility

A new study has found that elderly patients discharged from hospitals who have highly personalized diets live longer. This group also has lower rates of rehospitalization.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, studied 259 hospitalized patients over the age of 65, who were deemed to be nutritionally “at risk.” These patients were evaluated by dieticians at the time of admission and three times after discharge in their homes. These same dieticians worked with the patients to develop dietary menus after their hospitalizations and then checked in via phone for six months. The dieticians built the diets around inexpensive food and simple recipes.

At the end of the study, investigators found that the patients who followed intense dietary guidelines—the intervention group—lived longer and were less likely to be rehospitalized than those in the control group.