Simplified dietary assessment to detect vitamin a deficiency

The International Vitamin A Consultative Group has proposed that the simplified dietary assessment (SDA) be evaluated as a possible non-invasive, inexpensive method to identify and monitor groups at risk for suboptimal vitamin A intake, and consequently at risk for vitamin A deficiency. We therefore tested the performance of the SDA as compared to plasma retinol criteria in four rural communities in Northern Thailand. Our results demonstrated the SDA, but not XN, to be concordant with retinol in all four communities in categorizing risk of vitamin A deficiency. We conclude that vitamin A deficiency is a problem in selected rural subgroups in Northern Thailand, and that the SDA technique performed very well when compared to plasma retinol. These results suggest that the SDA is a practical non-invasive field tool that has significant potential to be incorporated into current guidelines for clinical and biochemical assessments of vitamin A status.