Applied Medical Informatics (Dec 2008)
NUTRIBASE - Data base for Nutritional Evaluation and Dietetic Treatment in Populational Metabolic Diseases
Abstract
The nutritional evaluation and diet prescription are laborious and require much time. They need calculations of basic nutritional indices, to precisely diagnose and finally to indicate the proper nutritional recommendations based on demographic, anthropometric, biochemical data and medical history of the patient. Our purpose was to create a new strategic approach to increase the rapid elaboration of nutritional evaluation, calculation of carbohydrate controlled diets and a software implementation. We named the outcome application Nutribase. The application could be used in clinical settings and/or nutritional research environments for calculating the composition of diet in diabetes and other metabolic disturbances, for helping dieticians and nutrition professionals as well as an educational instrument for patients and students. Nutribase (an Access based software) collects data on nutritional and biological parameters related to dietary assessment and treatment of the subjects with metabolic diseases but not only, calculates the body mass index, ideal body weight and metabolic requirements of patients, provides ready-made diet models and recommendations according to the calculated metabolic requirements, diagnosis, provides tables of composition of foods (calories, carbohydrates, proteins, lipids), allows an assessment of diet composition per meal, provides a flexible educational instrument for creating or adjusting a diet according to the patients’ preferences, is very much time saving in clinical settings and it may be adapted for epidemiological nutritional studies.