Publications by authors named "Marika Dello Russo"

Article Synopsis
  • Diet has a significant impact on gut microbiota, highlighting the need for personalized nutrition based on individual dietary habits.
  • The Stance4Health project created the S4H Food Frequency Questionnaire and i-Diet S4H app to evaluate food intake related to gut microbiota.
  • Validation studies showed the S4H-FFQ reliably estimates dietary patterns, correlating well with another validated questionnaire and indicating its potential for enhancing personalized nutrition and health research.
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Background: Asthma is a common, multifactorial chronic disease with a major impact on children and adolescents. Exposure to food contaminants is one of the contributing factors to asthma. This study aims to evaluate the intake and exposure of different contaminants and explore their association with childhood asthma.

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Objective: To investigate the reliability of parental recall of birth weight, birth length and gestational age several years after birth.

Methods: Parentally recalled birth parameters were obtained from the European multicentric cohort study IDEFICS (Identification and prevention of dietary- and lifestyle-induced health effects in children and infants) and compared to the corresponding data externally recorded in the child's medical check-up booklet. The agreement between the two sources was examined using Bland-Altman plots, intraclass correlation coefficients and Cohen's kappa for clinically relevant categories.

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Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) have been implicated in chronic diseases in adults, but their role in paediatric populations remains uncertain. This study, conducted on the Italian sample of the I.Family project, aimed to investigate the relationship between dietary and urinary fluorescent AGEs in children and adolescents.

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Dietary diversity (DD) plays a crucial role in fostering high-quality diets, but its association with health outcomes, particularly body adiposity and non-communicable diseases (NCDs), is inconsistent. This may be due to a lack of a standardized method for estimating DD. Our study investigates the association between two DD indices, namely the dietary diversity score (DDS) and food variety score (FVS), and anthropometric measures, biochemical parameters, and diet quality in a large population sample from the I.

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Unhealthy diets represent a major risk for the pathogenesis of metabolic and chronic inflammatory diseases. Improving the quality of diet is important to prevent chronic diseases, and diet-induced modifications of the gut microbiota (GM) community likely play an important role. The EU-funded Stance4Health project aims at performing a randomized clinical trial based on a nutritional intervention program in the context of normal weight and overweight adults as well as children with obesity and gluten-related disorders or allergy/intolerance to cow's milk.

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Introduction: Unbalanced dietary intake has been increasingly recognized as an important modifiable risk factor for asthma. In this study, we assessed whether a pro-inflammatory diet is associated with higher asthma burden in three steps: (1) identification of asthma latent classes (LC) based on symptoms, indoor exposures, and pulmonary function; (2) identification of risk factors associated with LC membership; and (3) estimation of the probabilities of LC membership with variation in DII.

Methods: A cross-sectional study on 415 children aged 5-14 years (266 with persistent asthma and 149 controls).

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Background And Aims: Food processing has been indicated as a factor capable of negatively affecting the global food system, including the profile of consumers' diets. The objectives of the present study were to provide a description of the consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in the large population of children, adolescents and adults from eight European countries participating to the I.Family study, and to investigate the association between UPFs intake and nutritional quality of the diet.

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Pasta represents a staple food in many populations and, in recent years, an increasing number of pasta items has been placed on the market to satisfy needs and trends. The aims of this work were: (i) to investigate the nutritional composition of the different types of pasta currently sold in Italy by collecting the nutrition facts on their packaging; (ii) to compare energy, nutrient and salt content per 100 g and serving in fresh and dried pasta; (iii) to compare the nutrition declaration in pairs of products with and without different declarations (i.e.

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Plant-based drinks represent a heterogeneous class of beverages, made from several vegetal sources, with a market rapidly expanding around the world. These beverages are mainly drunk in the replacement of milk. Thus, aims of the present study were to: (i) evaluate the nutritional declaration of 330 plant-based drinks currently available on the Italian market; (ii) compare their nutrition facts based on type, presence or not of organic certification and nutrition (NC) or health claims (HC), and of specific claims ("no added sugars" and "source of calcium"); (iii) compare their nutrition composition with cow's milk.

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Sugar, particularly as free sugars or sugar-sweetened beverages, significantly contributes to total energy intake, and, possibly, to increased body weight. Excessive consumption may be considered as a proxy of poor diet quality. However, no previous studies evaluated the association between the habit of adding sugars to "healthy" foods, such as plain milk and fresh fruit, and indicators of adiposity and/or dietary quality in children.

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Background: The blood pressure (BP) increase with age is well documented in adults and children. However, in the pediatric age group, body size is the most important determinant of age-related BP increases. The aim of the present analysis was to investigate the relationships between age, gender, and body size and BP in children.

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