Clinical Research Directory

Food Typologies and Multidimensional Phenotyping of Elderly in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (Part'AGE)

To better understand how diet influences health during aging, the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE) is working with the Gérontopôle Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes on a project called Part'AGE. Part'AGE is a participatory research project where researchers want to recruit 1,000 people aged between 55 and 75 years, men and women, living in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in urban or rural areas. The goal is to study eating habits and state of health. To do this, researchers will examine many factors that can influence them, such as physical activity, overall health, consumption patterns or territories. Researchers will collect detailed information to classify participants into different groups (food typologies) based on their eating habits and state of health. With this distribution, the goal is to be able to give each group personalized nutritional advice to age in better health. To participate in the study, the participants will need to collect a few drops of blood from the end of the finger, a urine sample, and do some tests (mobility, oral health). It will also be necessary to fill out questionnaires on eating habits, physical activity, and other aspects that may influence health. The benefices for to participants will be to contribute to nutrition research and to receive personalized feedback and advices on eating habits.

Nutrition to Support Postoperative Recovery

Older surgical patients commonly have malnutrition, and there is evidence these patients have increased risk for poor physical and brain recovery after surgery and anesthesia. There are scientific-based recommendations to provide nutritional supplements to support recovery. However, to date these recommendations do not address a broad group of nutrients likely to reverse common deficiencies. Team members have created a palatable, broad-spectrum and stable nutritional shake that we will give to patients after surgery. We propose to test the nutritional shake in frail older surgical patients at Dartmouth Health to determine if a nutrition shake provided after surgery improves recovery of physical function and cognitive abilities. Half the patients will receive the shake and the other will receive the standard of care postoperative nutritional instructions after surgery. We will collect information regarding physical function and cognitive abilities of all the patients while in the hospital and 90 days after surgery. We will use this data to apply for funding for a powered randomized trial to determine the role of nutrition in optimizing physical and cognitive recovery from surgery in older patients.