submitted by Mariah Jackson
The Medical Nutrition Education Division has six nutrition research abstracts accepted to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo (FNCE), to be presented this October. FNCE is one of the world’s largest meetings of food and nutrition experts. More than 10,000 registered dietitian nutritionists, nutrition researchers, and health-care providers typically flock to a major city every October for this premier conference. But this year, things look a little different, with the conference going completely virtual. These six abstracts will be presented during a virtual poster presentation session, with pre-recorded audio descriptions and a live question and answer section.
Five of the abstracts are from CAHP Master of Medical Nutrition students Capstone projects, Class of December 2019. The students’ topics range from Vitamin A and bone density in post-menopausal women, to food insecurity and diet diversity in pregnant women, to a collaboration project with Manju Mukherjee, PhD, in CAHP’s Cytotechnology program, applying an eye tracking technology as a possible evaluation tool for Nutrition Focused Physical Exam (NFPE) performance of nutrition students.
The final abstract accepted was by Medical Nutrition faculty, Mariah Jackson and Corri Hanson, PhD, assisted by Nebraska Medicine outpatient oncology nutrition therapists. The abstract reported results from a quality improvement project describing weight-maintenance in an at-nutritional-risk cancer patient population. Their pilot findings show that significant weight loss was highly prevalent in cancer patients prior to seeing a dietitian, and further weight loss was attenuated in most patients after seeing a dietitian over 12 weeks, promoting the role of dietitians in cancer patient care.