OBJECTIVES: To describe mortality evolution of malnutrition in elderly in Rio de Janeiro (RJMA) and São Paulo Metropolitan Areas (SPMA); to verify it's tendecies, between 1980-1996; and to propose a model wich permit us to foresee the cases occurances. METHODOLOGY: It's a time series analysis, using ecological data. People from RJMA and SPMA around 60 year-old and older ones, of both sexes were included in this research. The source of those data were the Mortality Information System (1980-1998). The series of monthly cases were analyzed, in a period from January of 1980 to December of 1996. To model the series and to predict the malnutrition cases in elderly. The method Box and Jenkins was used, SARIMA (Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average). RESULTS: The results show the existence of seasonable pattern with the largest number of deaths during the months of June and July in SPMA probably because of the cold weather in São Paulo in the winter and during the month of january, in Rio de Janeiro, probably because of the high temperature in this city in the summer. These results can be explained by the difficult of elderly to mainten their bodies in a good temperature during those months what represents an additional stress to their organism poor in nutritional reservations. CONCLUSIONS: The series presented a rising tendency of death and showed seasonable pattern in winter in SPRM and in the summer in RJRM. To estimate the SARIMA models to the Regions for the year of 1996, the results reforced the hypothesis that this method can be efficient to make future forecasts. It's probably that a research wich considers so many death causes will permit to verify the real contribution of the malnutrition as the basic cause or at least a contributive cause of those deaths.
Malnutrition; Aged; Mortality; Time series analysis; Epidemiology
