Clinical Nutrition

Biography

Biography: Souheir Alia

Abstract

Obesity is a disease, which stands alone by itself, and it is accompanied by many co-morbidities, and that is why many means to treat obesity comes into account and one of the most prevalent ways in UAE is by bariatric surgery. Despite the vast research assessing nutrition knowledge of patients of several health conditions, none of the papers assessed the nutrition knowledge of patients’ post-bariatric surgeries, although this category of patients is very susceptible to malnutrition post-surgery. My aim in this study was to assess the general nutrition knowledge and the knowledge specifi c to the dietary protocol post-surgery, the medical and nutritional complications, and their awareness and understanding of dumping syndrome specifi cally, the clarity of information conveyed by the dietitians and its eff ect on their levels of compliance of the post-bariatric surgery dietary protocol and the follow up appointments with the dietitians, and fi nally a small part gave a glimpse of their quality of life post-surgery.

Method: The methods used to analyze the questionnaire was with the help of SPSS version 23.0. Descriptive statistics such as frequencies, proportions, means, and standard deviations were used. Statistical tests such as Chi-Square test of independence, and Pearson’s correlation were used to test correlation. To test signifi cant diff erences between values of quantitative variable were used using the statistical test ANOVA or its equivalent non-parametric test named Kruskal-Wallis. Normality was tested using the Shapiro-Wilk test, while Levene’s test was used to test the equality of variance.

Results: The results of this study showed a fairly good general nutrition knowledge of both groups, the questions assessing nutrition knowledge of the dietary protocol post-surgery were added up and given a score out of 14, in which it showed that only 19.4% of participants had very good knowledge, 66.2% had average knowledge, and 14.4% had poor knowledge. In addition, most patients didn’t know what dumping syndrome is, and of those who knew what it is 66.6% of them knew the food that promote its occurrence, and almost half of the participants who answered yes knew the symptoms of it. On the other hand, 79.5% of the patients followed up with a dietitian, and only 30.1% showed compliance to the dietitian’s instructions, which was strongly related to patients fi nding the information conveyed vague and unclear as 71.2% considered it as aforementioned.

However, the most experienced symptom post-bariatric surgeries was nausea, followed by dizziness, dehydration, and finally vomiting. As for the overall quality of life of participants the highest percentage 45.8% was given to participants who never felt agitated, fatigued and/or regretted their decision of getting operated, and as much as 83.1% found their daily activities to be more enjoyable. In conclusion, patients who undergo bariatric surgeries are a great area of improvement now that we can spot some gaps in the health care provided.