MedDietCalc: multi calculator to compute scores of adherence to Mediterranean Diet

• DOI: 10.1007/s12553-019-00341-4
• Publication Date: 2019-06-29T08:02:36Z
• Authors: Miguel Menéndez O...; David Lora Pablos; Agustín Gómez de ...
• Keywords: 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; 3. Good health

Mediterranean Diet (MedDiet) is broadly aknowledged as healthy. Different scoring systems of adherence to MedDiet have been developed. These indexes share components, but also disagree and don’t correlate as expected. So, methodological issues arise when comparing studies using different MedDiet adherence scores. Furthermore, scoring calculus is time consuming and prone to error. We develop this package as a reproducible and easy-to-use way of calculating different scores of adherence to MedDiet and provide a methodological improvement to nutriepidemiological studies using adherence scores. Each function in MedDietCalc package computes a single score according to its authors published scoring schema. Implementation: R package. Main feature is a group of calculators of 14 literature available MedDiet scores, with several implementations to ease their use. It also includes a sample dataset from DRECE 6 study and FRESCO cardiovascular risk score calculator. Available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network [ CRAN.R-project.org ] under the name “MedDietCalc”, licensed with General Public License 3. We provide the first software to compute and compare different MedDiet scores, which can also be used with datasets. Different scores to measure adherence to MedDiet exist, with no gold standard. In the provided sample just 3 score pairs were highly correlated, and most of them were moderately or poorly correlated. This disagreement limits our understanding of the effects of MedDiet on health status. Comparability of studies could be improved if adherence to MedDiet were reported with more than a single score.