Research Article Review
Transition to Professional Nursing Practice
NUR 230

Research Article Review
The authors DeMille, Deming, Lupinacci, and Jacobs published the research article entitled, “The Effect of the Neutropenic Diet in the Outpatient Setting: A Pilot Study” The authors aim was to discover if prescribing a neutropenic diet to patients receiving care in an outpatient setting was beneficial in reducing fevers in those patients. They also sought to find out how compliant these patients would be with a neutropenic diet and what the resulting number of positive blood cultures for gram-negative rods would be among the participants using or not using the diet. This article was interesting to me because I did a case study on patient with severe aplastic anemia with resulting pancytopenia, who was also being administered the immune suppressant, Cyclosporine. This patient was severely immune compromised and part of his neutropenic precautions was a neutropenic diet. This diet was easy to provide while he was hospitalized but I was curious about when a patient is discharged do they still follow the strict diet? This article gave me some answers and some insight to my questions.
This study of the effects of a neutropenic diet in outpatients was geared toward patients who had neutropenia, the study defines neutropenia as an “absolute neutrophil count (ANC) of less than 1,000/mm3” (DeMille, 2006). The study criteria required patients who were between the ages of 18 to 70 years old who would be starting their first chemotherapy session in an outpatient chemotherapy clinic. In addition to newly starting chemotherapy, the patients were also selected for their type of chemotherapy that had a high probability of resulting in neutropenia. and whose chemotherapy “did not require pretreatment with colony-stimulating factors or those used for cancers that usually are not associated with alterations in blood counts prior to treatment” (DeMille, 2006). The study did not include any patients diagnosed with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), acute leukemia or anyone who was receiving a stem cell transplant due to exsisting abnormal blood cell counts. Additionally the study avoided anyone who was unable to consume food by mouth such as those being administered an “enteral or paraenteral, or all-liquid diet” (DeMille, 2006). The study group subjects consisted of a convenience sample of 28 patients between 33 to 67 years of age who would begin chemotherapy with their first dose. The patients would all have chemotherapy that ranged from one to 13 routines and met the study requirements listed above. The findings of the research pilot study can be generalized to most patients who are prescribed a neutropenic diet in an outpatient setting.