Development and Validation of a Self-Administered Simplified Food Frequency Questionnaire for FODMAP Intake...

Area of Science:

• Dietary assessment
• Gastroenterology
• Nutritional epidemiology

Background:

• A validated tool to assess high-Fermentable Oligo-Di-Mono-saccharides and Polyols (FODMAP) food intake frequency in Europe is currently lacking.
• High-FODMAP diets are associated with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) symptoms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a self-administered questionnaire (FFQ-FODMAP-BE) to estimate high-FODMAP food consumption frequency.
• To assess the questionnaire's utility in a Belgian adult population including healthy volunteers (HV) and IBS patients.

Main Methods:

• Prospective administration of the FFQ-FODMAP-BE twice within two weeks to Belgian HV and IBS patients.
• Comparison with a dietician's food history and 5-day food diaries.
• Evaluation of reproducibility using Intra-Class Correlation (ICC) and validity using Spearman and Kendall correlations, sensitivity, specificity, and ROC analyses.

Main Results:

• The FFQ-FODMAP-BE demonstrated good reproducibility (ICC = 0.86).
• Significant correlations were observed between FFQ-FODMAP-BE scores and dietician assessments (rho=0.33) and average daily FODMAP intake (rho=0.36).
• The questionnaire achieved 80% sensitivity and 73% specificity in discriminating low from moderate/high FODMAP consumers using a threshold of 1.80.

Conclusions:

• The FFQ-FODMAP-BE is a reproducible tool for assessing high-FODMAP food consumption frequency.
• The questionnaire shows good correlation with expert dietary assessments.
• This tool can aid in identifying moderate to high FODMAP consumers in a Belgian context.