An Interview with Dr. Carlo Pedrolli
OBM Geriatrics Editorial Office 
LIDSEN Publishing Inc., 2000 Auburn Drive, One Chagrin Highlands, Suite 200, Beachwood, OH, USA
Received: June 01, 2022 | Accepted: June 02, 2022 | Published: June 09, 2022
OBM Geriatrics 2022, Volume 6, Issue 2, doi:10.21926/obm.geriatr.2202199
Recommended citation: OBM Geriatrics Editorial Office. An Interview with Dr. Carlo Pedrolli. OBM Geriatrics 2022; 6(2): 199; doi:10.21926/obm.geriatr.2202199.
© 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the conditions of the Creative Commons by Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is correctly cited.
Dr. Carlo Pedrolli
1. Could You Please Provide Your Personal Information & Photos (Portrait and One from Research (Laboratory, Clinc, etc.))?
Dr. Carlo Pedrolli, is Head of the Nutritional Department at S. Chiara Hospital in Trento, which is a town in the North of Italy near the Austrian border. The Hospital has 800 beds and the community on which it is based is made by 500,000 people. In the Nutritional Department there are 3 physicians, 1 officer and 12 dietitians.
He had his degree in Medicine at Padua University in 1982, and afterward he gained three different specializations, in Internal medicine, in Cardiology (Verona university) and in Nutrition (Padua University). Dr. Pedrolli has published more than 40 peer-reviewed publications indexed on PubMed and cited over 1837 times with an h-index of 19.
He worked in Internal medicine ward for more than 20 yrs., practicing the whole of a general Ward; in late 15 yrs. He moved to Nutritional Department, practicing Artificial Nutrition, both in the community and in Hospital, Eating Disorders, Hospital catering, and teaching Nutrition at Verona university, in Nursing degree and in Oral Hygiene Degree.
His research was centered on nutritional screening and assessment, both in the community and hospital/nursing homes; in last years his research is pointed above all about dysphagia; he is now the Italian reference leader of IDDSI (International Dysphagia Diet Standardization Initiative).
2. Could You Please Tell Us Your Scientific Background?
I’m very interested in patients and their health; starting from Internal medicine, in the hospital where I worked before (Rovereto) the Nutritionist retired and the head of Internal medicine Department asked me to be involved in nutrition; at the beginning I had 4 dietitians to coordinate; I was engaged starting from the beginning of Nutrition; I didn’t have a qualification in it, which I gained afterwards; so I had to organize an nutrition clinics for the community and consultation in hospital for in-patients, dealing with artificial nutrition, malnutrition screening and assessment, dysphagia and many other aspects of nutrition such as nutrition in cancer and in diabetes and renal failure; these fields became step by step my field of research.
3. Can You Share Your Career Development Story Briefly? For Example, What Cases Have Influenced You the Most?
Once I was in my hospital and I was in the hospital kitchen; I was talking with the chef and I saw he was pouring something with a very bad colour and I presumed with a very bad taste on a plate; I asked him: what is sit? And he told me that was dysphagia diet for a patient and he was disgusted about it….; I was very impressed from this confidence and from that moment one of my personal goal was to made proud a chef of the food he provides to in patients in general and to dysphagic people in particular….
4. What is Your Main Research Area? What Got You Interested in Scientific Research in The First Place?
At the moment my personal research is above all about preventing hospital and nursing home malnutrition with food and in- catering; but I started from finding very simple ways of practicing nutrition screening and assessments, to be able to find very soon malnutrition in people referred to hospital for practicing some intervention by nutritional support; dysphagia screening is a way to find malnutrition where there is some possible intervention. For example in medical literature in Italy dysphagia is presumed more or less 12% in nursing homes, but I published a paper showing that in my hospital, which is a general hospital, we provide out of 1,400,000 meals per year more or less 21% meals of modified texture; that means that dysphagic people in my hospital has a prevalence of more or less 21%.
5. Is There a Book You've Read that You'd Recommend Universally (i.e., to Everyone You Meet)?
There are two book I can recommend; the first one is “Awakenings” by Oliver Sacks, a very charming neurologist who succeed in healing, unfortunately only for a little time, people who suffered from lethargy and parkinsonism after a viral epidemic; he used for the first time alfa methyl dopa and he had many awakenings in his patients; the second one was recommended to me by my neurology teacher, in Verona University; it was written by a chemist, Dr Primo Levi, who succeeded to come back from Auschwitz camp; and he shows how a camp was organized and how he survived, thinking always he didn’t deserve to.
6. What is Your Long-Term Research Goal?
I don’t know but I think that everyone of us, practicing medicine, could just see what other people have ever seen without understand it; for example Fleming saw penicillin in a very casual way but he understood it was something very important; so I think that everyone of us, practicing medicine should keep on observing in a very concentrated way what he sees every day and to try to imagine from the reality to understand what everyone sees without understand it; I think that’s what a physician has to do till the end of his professional life.
7. Do You Have Any Suggestions or Recommendations for Young Scientists, for Instance, Your Students and Young Collaborators?
When you found something you are interested in go ahead, do not look for money or career but just concentrate on what you love and like, both in professional life and in personal life.
8. What Do You Think of the Future of OBM Geriatrics, an Open-Access Journal?
In your opinion, what challenges and developments can we expect to see in the next few years in this field? I think that open access journal is just a first step; we have to go ahead in a very simple way of communicating science and scientists among themselves; I think we have to go form a paper to a channel made of paper, TV, you tube films, congress, etc. free of charge.
