[ACTUAL SITUATIONS OF FOOD ALLERGY RELATED EDUCATION AT NUTRITIONIST TRAINING SCHOOL IN JAPAN].

BACKGROUND & AIM: In the clinical field of food allergies, dietary management towards patients is done inadequately. One plausible reason for this is the possible deficiency of food allergy education during the training courses for registered dietitians. This time, we will investigate the actual situations of food allergy education practiced in the training courses of registered dietitians, and reveal the point at issue. METHOD: We conducted a factual survey via mailing method towards registered dietitian and dietitian nutritionist training facilities throughout the whole country. The survey items include the existence of lectures or practical trainings about food allergies, the pre-graduate education of food allergies, and much more. RESULTS: We got answers from 213 facilities (collection rate 75%). Lectures about food allergies were conducted in 96% of the facilities, and the median of the lecture hour was 210 minutes. Similarly, practical trainings were conducted in 74% of the facilities, and the median was 90 minutes. The rate of people who strongly feel the need for food allergy education was 49%, and the rate for people who felt it was 50%. However, the rate of an ideal educational condition was 32%, and the rate of people who didn't have any plans of increasing the number of lectures and practical trainings were 82%. The major reasons for this were, the crammed condition of the curriculums, and the difficulties conducting lectures and practical trainings that span over several fields of expertise. CONCLUSION: In the training courses of registered dietitians, the practice of food allergy education is hardly adequate, and the educational sites seem to recognize the problem, but they are also pessimistic regarding the improvement of the situation due to the difficult problems that were revealed in this survey. From now on, it is strongly expected for the government and its people to work together to improve the current situation.

Donor age reflects the replicative lifespan of human fibroblasts in culture.

Human fibroblasts, which have a finite lifespan in cultures, have been widely used as a model system for cellular aging, and frequently used as one model of human aging. But whether cellular aging contributes to organismal aging has been controversial. To reinvestigate this question, we cultured human fibroblasts from the skin of one individual volunteer collected at different ages. Over a period of 27 years (donor age 36 years to 62 years), we obtained skin cells four times at appropriate intervals, and established eight fibroblast lines. These human fibroblasts have presented evidence for a correlation between donor age and proliferative lifespan in vitro. This result parallels the fact that telomeric DNA size cultured fibroblasts decrease with the increase in donor age. These cell lines had a normal diploid human chromosome constitution and will be useful in studies of human biology including aging.