Development and validation testing of a short nutrition questionnaire to identify dietary risk
factors in preschoolers aged 12-36 months
Sammanfattning
Background: Although imbalances in dietary intakes can have short and longer term influences
on the health of preschool children, few tools exist to quickly and easily identify nutritional risk in
otherwise healthy young children.
Objectives: To develop and test the validity of a parent-administered questionnaire (NutricheQ) as a
means of evaluating dietary risk in young children (12-36 months).
Design: Following a comprehensive development process and internal reliability assessment, the
NutricheQ questionnaire was validated in a cohort of 371 Irish preschool children as part of the
National Preschool Nutrition Survey. Dietary risk was rated on a scale ranging from 0 to 22 from 11
questions, with a higher score indicating higher risk.
Results: Children with higher NutricheQ scores had significantly (p<0.05) lower mean daily intakes of
key nutrients such as iron, zinc, vitamin D, riboflavin, niacin, folate, phosphorous, potassium,
carotene, retinol, and dietary fibre. They also had lower (p<0.05) intakes of vegetables, fish and fish
dishes, meat and infant/toddler milks and higher intakes of processed foods and non-milk beverages,
confectionery, sugars and savoury snack foods indicative of poorer dietary quality. Areas under the
curve values of 84.7 and 75.6% were achieved for ‘medium’ and ‘high’ dietary risk when compared
with expert risk ratings indicating good consistency between the two methods.
Conclusion: NutricheQ is a valid method of quickly assessing dietary quality in preschoolers and in
identifying those at increased nutritional risk.