Metabolomics is an objective dietary assessment method in response to a nutrition intervention. Human dietary feeding studies using metabolomics may involve single food, partial- or whole diet provision and/or dietary prescription. However, reports of these studies often lack details about the dietary intervention information, with extensive variability in methods employed, tools and procedures used to assess and quantify dietary intake. Reproducibility of these studies is impaired by poor reporting.
The Precision and Personalised Nutrition Team in the University of Newcastle, Australia, is developing a reporting guideline aiming to reduce reporting heterogeneity across metabolic studies; and improve evidence synthesis and meta-analyses to strengthen and develop the field of nutritional metabolomics overall for clinical applications. This will include identifying a core set of ‘items’ (i.e., outcomes) relating to dietary interventions that should be both measured and reported in all human feeding studies administering a dietary intervention where nutritional metabolomics is also being measured.
Jessica J. A. Ferguson, Erin D. Clarke, Jordan Stanford, María Gómez-Martín, Tammie Jakstas, Clare E. Collins, DID-METAB Delphi Working Group Authors
Disease Category: Other
Disease Name: Chronic disease
Age Range: 0 - 120
Sex: Either
Nature of Intervention: Diet and nutrition
- Researchers
- Minimum dataset
- Delphi process
- Survey
Key gaps identified from our published systematic scoping review was used to inform a set of diet item details (DIDs) that required consensus from an expert panel to identify items as core, including their reporting sets and finally, a reporting guideline and checklist.
Subsequently, a two stage e-Delphi (totalling 5 survey rounds) is currently underway to gain consensus on a core set of DIDs and recommendations for their reporting in research papers describing human feeding interventions and the dietary metabolome. Stage 1 (2 rounds) aims to identify core DIDs and finalise their phrasing. Stage 2 (3 rounds) aims to identify the level of detail required for reporting each DID including the location at which the DIDs are to be reported in a research paper.
Each survey is released and open for completion by the expert sample for ~3 weeks and separated by ~3 weeks in between to allow for data synthesis and deliberation by the Precision and Personalised Nutrition Team. Where relevant, an agreement cut-off = 70% is required for consensus to be deemed.
Experts were recruited worldwide across expertise in the fields of human feeding trial design, nutritional metabolomics, and/or diet-related biospecimen analysis. Participation is canonical, meaning, if a participant was a non-respondent for a survey round, they were then excluded from the Delphi and unable to re-enter at a later survey round.
Findings of the Delphi will be reported in a published peer-review journal paper(s) including the final reporting checklist as a supplementary file. All completing experts of the Delphi will be invited as co-authors as part of the DID-Metab Delphi Working Group, on the research paper.