We provide a dietary assessment service to researchers, who can purchase our Dietary Questionnaire for Epidemiological Studies (DQES). Once these forms have been completed, we process them and provide nutrient intake data.
The DQES form (formerly known as the Food Frequency Questionnaire) remains the property of Cancer Council Victoria. It's made available to parties on a fee-for-service basis.
Sample Food Frequency Questionnaire (312kb)
The DQES form (version 2) is designed to be self-administered, but can also be interviewer-administered. If self-administered it's the responsibility of the study coordinator to ensure forms are completed correctly, with no pages or questions left blank, before returning them to our Cancer Epidemiology Centre for scanning and analysis.
The user guide below explains how to administer the questionnaire. It provides details of how it was developed, sources of nutrient composition data and nutrient outputs.
User Information Guide - Dietary Questionnaires (1.43Mb)
Order forms - Dietary Questionnaires (159kb)
Our questionnaires were developed for use with Australian adults. They were used in the Australian arm of the Breast Cancer CFR, the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study, the Australian Prostate Cancer Family Study, the Australian Longitudinal Study of Women's Health and over 20 other smaller epidemiological studies in Australia.
The original questionnaire was developed for the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study (Health 2020), including foods identified from weighed food records among men and women born in Australia, Greece and Italy. The current questionnaire (DQES v2) was developed from the original, and now comprises a food list of 74 items with 10 frequency response options ranging from 'Never' to '3 or more times per day'.
The questionnaire also contains 3 photographs of scaled portions for 4 foods (used to calculate a portion size calibrator), questions on the overall frequency of fruit and vegetable consumption (used to calibrate the overestimation of these foods in the food list), and questions on consumption of foods that don't fit easily into the frequency format (such as breads).
The 74 food items are grouped into 4 categories:
A separate set of questions covers intake of alcoholic beverages. The food composition data used to calculate nutrients are from NUTTAB95, supplemented by other data where necessary. The output includes:
water, kilojoules, fat (total),protein, carbohydrate (total), sugars, starch and dextrins, dietary fibre, cholesterol, sodium, potassium, calcium, phosphorus magnesium, iron, zinc, retinal equivalent, retinol, thiamine, beta-carotene equivalent, riboflavin, niacin niacin equivalent, vitamin c, alcohol, saturated fatty acids (total), monounsaturated fatty acids(total), polyunsaturated acids (total).
We've recently extended the calculations to include individual fatty acids, carotenoids, glycemic index, and glycemic load.
| Quantity |
Cost per FFQ & Analysis (Inc. GST) |
| 100 to 499 |
$14.85 |
| 500 to 999 |
$12.65 |
| 1,000 plus |
$11.00 |
Please see User Guide above for procedures and order forms.
Nutritional Assessment Office
Cancer Epidemiology Centre
Cancer Council Victoria
1 Rathdowne St, Carlton, Vic, 3053
Ph: +61 3 9635 5603, Fax: +61 3 9635 5330
Email: ffq@cancervic.org.au
