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Validity of dietary patterns derived in nutrition surveys using a priori and a posteriori multivariate statistical
Vassiliki Bountziouka1, George Tzavelas, Evangelos Polychronopoulos
1Group of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Methods, Department of Science of Dietetics-Nutrition, Harokopio University, Athens, Greece.
Aim:
To evaluate the validity of dietary patterns derived using both a priori and a posteriori methods.
Method:
Five hundred individuals (46 ± 16 years, 40% males) completed a valid 76-food item food frequency questionnaire and a 3-day dairy. The MedDietScore was used to a priori assess the adherence to the Mediterranean diet, while principal components and cluster analysis were used as the a posteriori methods.
Results:
Both the a priori and a posteriori methods used led to relatively low-validity dietary patterns. However, the level of validity reached significance in many cases and, also, varied by the type of validation method used (i.e. Bland and Altman, non-parametric criteria, etc.).
Conclusion:
The aforementioned findings may suggest that the use of both a priori and a posteriori pattern analysis in nutrition surveys should be made with conscious thought and further research is needed in order to establish robust methodologies to assess the validity of patterns.
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