Special Diets and Support for Special People
Christina’s specialization in clinical nutrition, clinical researches, continuous education – including psychology science -, as well as her interaction with various healthcare professionals, pharmacotherapy knowledge, FSMPs and enteral nutrition know-how, and her experience with numerous patients (inpatient and outpatient), offer her a broad range of talent and skills in a wide spectrum of specialized nutrition services that can make a tremendous difference! That means you receive deep insights and expert nutritional care no matter your diagnosis. Christina has dealt cancer patients (especially breast cancer), patients with mental illness, children with growth failure, and a wide range of disease states and conditions. She realizes that dealing with specific diseases is a huge challenge for patients and families alike, and will be there for you with attentive, compassionate touch.
Dedicated to provide the safest, tailored, and compassionate nutritional care and service, she is here for you every step of the way, as you or a loved one navigate the process of disease from treatment to recovery and well-being.
Christina works with the patient and the physician/ interdisciplinary healthcare team to provide an evidence-based individualized nutritional diagnostic, therapy, education and counseling services to patients, families and their caregivers that is derived from the findings of an in-depth nutrition assessment and is integrated and compatible with the patient’s needs, in diverse patient populations from pediatrics to geriatrics. In certain diseases, disorders and medical conditions, nutrient requirements and ultimately a proper nutritional status, cannot be met by the consumption of standard foods alone. In such cases, Foodstuffs for Particular Nutritional Uses (PARNUTs), especially highly sophisticated foods called Foods For Special Medical Purposes (FSMPs), administered orally (Oral Nutritional Supplements) or via a feeding tube as indicated, are vital to supplement the diet or to replace food, to ensure good overall nutrition. Christina has the know-how of Nutritional Therapy (Oral and Enteral way of artificial feeding) and can provide expert advice and recommendation to ensure the effective and safe use of FSMP and other PARNUTs, in order to support enhanced patient outcome through an improved nutritional health.
Physical health matters, mental health matters! And Christina strives to deliver a nutrition care to anticipate her patients’ needs and exceed their expectations, so they can focus on their health (physical and mental), and recovery.
Christina provides Clinical Nutrition Care and Support services for Gastrointestinal Diseases, Diabetes, Renal Disease, Lipid Disorders, Food Allergy and Food Intolerance, Rheumatic Diseases, and other specific conditions including:
Pediatric Growth Failure (Failure to Thrive): : Growth failure is a condition that describes children whose weight or length/height arenot increasing at a rate consistent with a growth reference or standard, caused by inadequate caloric intake, malabsorption,excessive caloric expenditure, or defective use of nutrients. Failure to thrive carries a lot of emotional weight and must be handled delicately. Medical Nutrition is vital for the management and Christina’s nutritional therapeutic intervention is the appropriate step to get your boy or girl who is failing to thrive back on the track to a healthy childhood and give a good start in life.
Cystic Fibrosis: Maintaining optimal BMI or weight-for- length (infants through children 2 years of age) status is crucial for extending life expectancy and reducing disease severity. Individuals with CF benefit from early and aggressive nutritional intervention to prevent undernutrition, promotion of normal growth and development and to ensure good nutritional status and longer and healthier lives.
Developmental Disabilities: Children and youth with special health care needs (CSHCN) (e.g Cerebral Palsy, autism) require sound nutrition for growth and development and achievement of good nutritional health pose challenges due to frequent nutritional risk factors. They all have distinct nutrition and feeding concerns and Christina is here for you to provide accurate scientific information and tailor-made, family-centered, nutrition services to promote normal growth and development, wellness and improve quality of life.
Cancer: The disease and its treatments, though, can change how you taste, swallow or chew your food and can temporarily change how your body uses food. Thus, even when a person makes good nutritional and lifestyle choices, achieving good nutritional health may be challenging. Optimal nutrition is an integral part of the cancer recovery process and beyond. Whether a patient is going through treatment or he/ she is disease free or has stable disease following recovery, Christina’s services include optimum therapeutic diets for achieving or maintain a healthy body weight and optimum nutritional status with a strong immune system, nutrition build-up prior to and during therapy, management of cancer symptoms or nutrition-related treatment side effects, counseling on dietary supplements and complementary nutritional therapies, Counseling on drug-diet interactions, nutrition education for patients, families and their caregivers.
Mental and behavioral disorders (other than developmental disabilities). Nutrition matters! Targeted Medical Nutrition to individuals with depression, bipolar affective disorders, dementia, psychotic disorders and other mental illnesses are essential for lifelong mental wellness. It works alongside conventional treatment and can improve nutritional status, identify and correct distorted eating pattern, reduce the side-effects of medication (e.g. weight gain – a major side effect of several antipsychotic medications – or weight loss/ undernutrition – commonly seen in patients with dementia), optimize medication effectiveness (e.g. mood stabilization, better sleep mode, stress reduction), cognitive function (otherwise known as neuroprotection), manage concurrent and comorbid conditions (e.g glucose intolerance, dyslipidemia) and in general improve overall physical health and quality of life thus enabling the person to function at the highest level of independent living. When it comes to managing people with mental disorders the quality of the care means everything. Christina has been researching through her 2 years participation in the successful Greek Solutions for Wellness weight management (SfW) (funded by Pharmaserv Lilly Greece) and treating more than a thousand of persons with severe mental illness (SMI) with documented success.
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