Ammara Aqeel Moves DNA-Based Dietary Test Toward Clinical Application
Asking patients to fill out dietary surveys has proven time and again to be an incredibly unreliable method for obtaining this data. People are forgetful in the best of times and even more so when suffering from a life-threatening disease.
Despite being an added burden on already distressed patients, food surveys are still the standard way for clinicians to understand a patient’s eating habits. And while their accuracy may not usually be the difference between life and death, sometimes it can be.Asking patients to fill out dietary surveys has proven time and again to be an incredibly unreliable method for obtaining this data. People are forgetful in the best of times and even more so when suffering from a life-threatening disease.
“For people undergoing bone marrow transplants, one of the most important aspects of their recovery is making sure they are well nourished,” said Ammara Aqeel, a fourth-year PhD candidate at Duke. “Similarly, chemotherapy treatments often lead to appetite loss, but to be able to address it, doctors need to know how much a patient is eating to begin with. And patients are often too sick to do surveys or diaries.”
Aqeel thinks there might be a viable solution.