Recent case law has evidenced doctrinal ambiguity concerning whether State immunity precludes domestic courts’ jurisdiction when rights and interests of third-party States may be affected. This article posits that such confusion arises from a failure to recognize State immunity as a rule predicated on the sovereign status of the defendant. Through an analysis of State practice, the article contends that the concept of indirect impleading incorporated in the United Nations Convention on State Immunity does not challenge the status-based nature of this rule. Construing State immunity as a subject-matter rule erroneously conflates it with distinct doctrines, such as Monetary Gold and the act of State doctrine.

Near 20% of the Portuguese population is aged 65 years or above, a value similar to most developed countries. This older adult population also suffers from obesity and obesity-related pathologies. The environment encompasses a set of obesity determinants and knowing the associations between the environment and obesity may help health professionals and caregivers to provide for the older adults.

In this study, we aimed to relate anthropometric measures with socio-demographic data in older adults.

This is a cross-sectional study using data from the Pronutrisenior project, collected in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal. The sample consists of 456 older adults, aged 65 to 92 years without cognitive impairment. The sample consisted of older adults living at their homes. Socio-demographic, clinical, geographical, and anthropometric data was collected. The statistical analysis used IBM-SPSS-22.0 and consisted on descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations and UniANOVA. Significantly results (p < 0.05) are reported.

These older adults were mostly females (54.2%) with a mean age of 73.8 years (sd = 6.3), mean body mass index (BMI) of 29.1kg/m2 (sd = 4.8), mean waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) of 0.623 (sd = 0.073) and mean percentage of body fat mass (%BFM) of 40.7% (sd = 8.9%) for females and 30.2% (sd = 8.5%) for males. BMI, WHtR and %BFM were positively correlated. In this sample of older adults, higher values of these measures were associated to being female, younger, less educated; to having articular pains and respiratory problems, and not having insomnia, hypertension, chewing problems nor hearing problems; to drink more liquids but not consuming dairy products daily; to not take nutritional supplements but to take more medicines; to be without somebody to talk to and to be more dependent; and to live in a house without stairs to climb and to live near other older adults, and in a more urbanized area with streets with steeper slopes.

In this sample of older adults, obesity is related with health characteristics and those are related with socio-demographic and geographical characteristics of the area of residence. Besides the identification of risk factors for the older adult population, this information may help designing health care policies that takes in consideration the physical and geographical characteristics of the neighbourhood of the area of residence of the older adults.

Malnutrition is a serious health problem among older adults. The Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA) is the most used tool to assess malnutrition among older adults. It was proposed that the Screening section could be used as a short form of the MNA (MNA-SF), but the study of the two forms show a wide range of agreement (71.8 to 93.3% and Cohen's kappa from 0.52 to 0.78). Nevertheless, most of the studies recommend the use of the MNA-SF, but in some this conclusion is not completely congruent with the results. The aims of this work were to study the agreement between the nutritional status classification using the MNA-SF and the MNA-FF among Portuguese older adults living in the community, to compare the scores in each question of the MNA-FF between participants correctly or incorrectly classified using the MNA-SF, and to develop a more sensible version of the MNA-SF. The current study is part of the PRONUTRISENIOR project. Data from 456 older adults (54.2% females) aged 65 to 92 years (mean = 73; SD = 6) living in the community (Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal) were analyzed. The agreement between the two classifications is 82.7%, but Cohen's k shows a weak agreement (weighted k = 0.497; p < 0,001). MNA-SF showed a very low sensitivity (42.6%) detecting participants malnourished or at risk of malnutrition. Participants classified as normal using the MNA-SF despite at risk using the MNA-SF presented lower scores in two items from the Assessment section: number of full meals eaten daily and amount of fluid consumed per day. These two items were included in MNA-SF to obtain an extended short-version (MNA-SF8), which presented a sensitivity of 91.8% (and a specificity of 79.9%). The areas under the ROC curves were 0.858 and 0.929, respectively for MNA-SF and MNA-SF8. The addition of two items to the MNA-SF provides a more sensible tool to detect risk of malnutrition among elderly. These findings suggest that, among the studied population, general eating-related questions regarding (full meals and fluid intake) are relevant to assess malnutrition. Similar studies should be carried out among other populations in order to verify the possibility of their generalization. [The PRONUTRISENIOR project was financed by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA Grants (PT06 – Public Health Initiatives, reference 81NU5).]