Tailored Tube Feeding: Personalized Nutrition Strategy Speeds Up Recovery for Elderly ICU Patients

frontiersin.org July 2, 2026

Elderly patients on mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit (ICU) face a heightened risk of malnutrition and associated complications, yet standard feeding practices often fail to address their unique physiological needs. To solve this, researchers developed a clinically feasible, targeted enteral nutrition protocol structured around the Geriatric Nutritional Risk Index (GNRI), a screening tool tailored specifically to older adults.

The final framework was refined through two rounds of Delphi consultations involving 20 multidisciplinary experts to ensure a high level of consensus. To evaluate its real-world impact, a single-center, non-concurrent controlled study was performed on 128 elderly ICU patients, comparing 63 individuals who received the new GNRI-stratified protocol against 65 historical controls who underwent conventional nutritional management.

The implementation of this personalized nutrition protocol yielded highly significant improvements across both clinical and operational outcomes. After one week of treatment, patients in the experimental group demonstrated significantly higher levels of serum albumin and hemoglobin compared to the control group, even after adjusting for baseline values.

Furthermore, tailoring the feeding regimen to the patients’ specific geriatric nutritional risk profiles slashed the overall rate of enteral nutrition-related complications from 20.0% down to just 7.9%, representing an adjusted risk reduction of more than 80% (OR = 0.178).

Beyond improving direct nutritional and gastrointestinal markers, the protocol also translated into a faster recovery process.

Patients managed under the GNRI-stratified framework experienced a substantially shorter median duration of mechanical ventilation, dropping from 172.0 hours in the control group to 128.0 hours, and spent significantly less time overall in the hospital.

The study concludes that this specialized, expert-validated protocol is highly practical and scientifically sound, offering a robust strategy to optimize nutritional support, curb complications, and accelerate ICU liberation for vulnerable elderly patients.