Monitoring Public Health Nutrition in Europe: nutritional indicators and determinants of health status

Abstract

The aim of the study was to assess the reliability of questionnaire information on visits to a physician and the use of antibiotics taken for respiratory infections among schoolchildren attending a water-damaged school and a reference group of schoolchildren attending an undamaged school. Two similar questionnaires on respiratory morbidity in two consecutive years were sent to the parents. The information given on the questionnaires was compared with the patient's records of the local health centre. Although the overall total numbers of ambulatory visits in the patients' records and questionnaires seemed to indicate good reliability, a more detailed individual investigation showed poor recall validity from the questionnaires, including a high percentage of unreported visits to the local health centre from both schools. Underreporting was commoner in the control school than in index school. Recall was best for the children who had no visits to a doctor. Use of antibiotics had a better recall than ambulatory visits in both schools. The study indicates that information on health services in questionnaires is not reliable, at least when occurrences in a period of one year or more are evaluated. The use of patient records as a reference of accuracy is also unreliable, unless all the health care services available to the people in the community are covered.

Comparison of national food supply, household food availability and individual food consumption data in Portugal

“…Collected worldwide with similar methodologies, these indirect assessment methods have been referred to as valuable tools for European and international monitoring systems (Lang 1999;Sjöström et al 2005;Trichopoulou and DAFNE contributors 2001).…”

“…Regarding the information details obtained the "gold standard" level for a food and nutrition monitoring and surveillance data source would be the individual-based approach (EFCOSUM 2002;Sjöström et al 2005). However, as a result of their immense time and resource demands, these types of surveys, if available, are conducted in restricted areas and only rarely at the national level.…”

Are the eating habits of university students different to the rest of the Spanish population? Food availability, consumption and cost

“…Program for the European Master in Public Health Nutrition (Sjöstrom et al, 2005), nutritional states, socio-demographic factors and inequalities, and used the information obtained from the FBS from the FAO, the HBS for Spain carried out by the Spanish National Statistics Institute and an individual questionnaire for Castilla-La Mancha's university students (UCLMS from now on) to discover food consumption behavior, expenditure, the relationship between consumption and availability, between prices and availability, between prices and consumption, as well as information on the cost of these food products.…”

The importance of cardiorespiratory fitness for healthy metabolic traits in children and adolescents: the AVENA Study

“…Therefore, cardiorespiratory fitness has been suggested to be included in the European Health Monitoring System for the adult population (Sjöström et al 2005). suggested that cardiorespiratory fitness should also be included in the health monitoring systems from the early stages of life.…”