Nutrition intervention has great potential to reduce risk for cancer and chronic disease and to improve the patient's quality of life. Unfortunately relatively few physicians have the training or time to use nutrition therapy at its full potential in practice or research and dietitians are insufficiently trained to serve as nutrition resources to health care providers. As a result, the public has limited access to complete and accurate nutrition information while at the same time, morbidity and mortality from cancer and chronic diseases, attributable to inadequate nutrient intake or availability, continue to rise. The Clinical Nutrition Department at NYIT offers a rigorous graduate nutrition curriculum with focus on the mechanisms through which nutrients influence the processes of disease and prepares students to critically interpret current nutrition literature and to use nutrient modification to prevent and/or control cancer and related chronic disease. We propose to provide highly qualified graduates with a full year of targeted clinical rotations in centers of excellence in cancer nutrition in the Greater New York area to season their didactic learning and bring them to maturity as potential leaders in their field. Cross-training in medicine and clinical cancer nutrition, begun in didactic courses, will be extended and deepened through close mentoring by physician nutrition specialists. Didactic research methodology courses will provide a basis for participation in ongoing nutrition research trials under the guidance of competent and nurturing research mentors. Graduates from the combined didactic/clinical program will be competent to serve as nutrition educators and consultants to primary and specialist physicians and other health professionals and to collaborate with clinical and basic researchers on the design, implementation, analysis and interpretation of nutrition trials. Funds are requested to implement and evaluate the clinical portion of our innovative curriculum. Tuition and student compensation will assure that the students focus entirely on learning activities. Evaluation strategies to assess the impact of the combined didactic/clinical program on immediate and long-term outcomes have been developed. These strategies will guide formative evaluation over the five years of funding such that the validated model curriculum will become a basis for recommended didactic and clinical standards for advanced nutrition competency. Generalizeability of educational preparation will be facilitated by preparation and dissemination of the validated model curriculum by publication and presentation at national conferences, thereby achieving wider dissemination of clinical nutrition knowledge than funding would normally allow.
