Hi Jennifer L. Reed,

I think this article will be useful to you. Just go through the article.

But choosing of questionnaire depends upon your study design and your research question.

If you want to prove the association between previous dietary habits and heart failure, then you have to collect data on food habits of patients. It is suitable to community based studies.

If you want to know the existing dietary habits and outcome of heart failure patients, then you have to ask the patients to maintain dietary records. I think it is more suitable to hospital based studies.

To avoid bias you have to select the newly diagnosed heart failure patients. Because changes in dietary habits will start immediately after diagnosing the hear failure. Because Cardiologist will advise the patient and their relatives to change dietary habits immediately.

http://www.ucdenver.edu/research/CCTSI/programs-services/ctrc/Nutrition/Documents/Food_Frequency_Questionnaires.pdf

Hi Jennifer,

One of the FFQs that you did not include is the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center FFQ that was used in the Women's Health Initiative. Here is a link to their site for administration of their paper FFQ:

http://sharedresources.fredhutch.org/services/food-frequency-questionnaires-ffq

It is a well regarded and validated FFQ and one of the advantages of their system is that they use the University of Minnesota's NDSR database for analysis:

http://sharedresources.fredhutch.org/content/publications-relating-nutrition-assessment

We worked with the key investigator behind the Hutch FFQ, Dr. Alan Kristal, through a series of NIH grants to develop a web picture-based version of this FFQ which we call VioScreen. To be direct, I am plugging our FFQ as an option. VioScreen incorporates ~1,200 food portion size images to improve the results of a FFQ. We ran a validation study at Ohio State University with fabulous results:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212267213017760

In addition to the food images and also use of NDSR, we modified the flow and introduced branching technology. We also generate clinically useful pdf reports that can (if permitted by the study) be provided to subjects/patients.Each of the FFQs in this list have their advantages/disadvantges, one of ours is that you cannot combine our web FFQ with the use of a paper version in a study.

If you are interested in more information, please contact me

www.viocare.com

Sorry for a bit of advertisement in this response but the Hutch FFQ always seems to be the 4th FFQ on the list and is sometimes overlooked.

Best,

Rick Weiss

Thank you both for your suggestions and links. Quite helpful! 

Cheers, 

Jennifer