Diet, body composition and physical function in older adults
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Association between diet, body composition and physical function in older adults: a pilot study.
IRAS ID
250136
Contact name
Michelle McKinley
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Queen's University Belfast
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 8 months, 31 days
Research summary
Older people can become frail which means their body is not able to respond in the usual way to stress and they may struggle to maintain normal bodily functions. A good diet may reduce the risk of frailty. In a recent review of the science in this area, the Mediterranean diet pattern was the dietary pattern with the strongest evidence for an association with frailty. Studies are needed to explore if eating a Mediterranean diet will reduce risk of frailty. Frailty can be measured in a number of ways, for example, measuring muscle mass and fat mass by a DXA scan, measuring hand grip strength, and measuring physical function with tests such as walk tests. In order to design a Mediterranean diet study that will examine the effect of this diet on frailty we need to collect some data from older people that will allow us to work out what size our study needs to be. The study proposed here will allow us to do this by measuring diet, body composition, physical function and frailty endpoints in an older population. This information will then be used to design the Mediterranean diet intervention that we want to conduct.
REC name
West Midlands - Black Country Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/WM/0375
Date of REC Opinion
4 Jan 2019
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion