Un questionario rapido ed efficace per la valutazione delle abitudini dietetiche e dello stress ossidativo legato all'alimentazione nei pazienti pneumologici

The oxidative stress, defined as an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants, is gaining more and more importance in the pathogenesis of respiratory tract diseases. In the evaluation of patients with respiratory diseases (often due and/or aggravated by smoke), it's becoming more important also the assessment of food intake as a possible further negative effect on the oxidative stress. Therefore, the evaluation of dietary intakes is a key point. This need clashes with the difficulty of anamnestic collection of alimentary data, especially in the light of the complexity of existing questionnaires, unable to properly quantify the redox state (caused by improper dietary habits) and to construct a numerical score easily interpretable by a pneumologist. This paper is presenting a new questionnaire, the NSAS, on food habits which is specifically targeted as a companion instruments in biochemical studies. The questionnaire is shown to be very well accepted by people, with a very high response rate. Reliability of the NSAS (Chronbach Alpha) is very high, equal to 0.67 (95% CI 0.59-0.74) with a very high score of 0.76 at the Spearman- Brown test. NSAS score were obtained with a Principal Component Analysis and showed to correlate well with external data such BMI. The NSAS is thus representing a valid alternative to more structured but heavier to administer food habit questionnaires.