Blanca Riquelme Gallego

My academic background is Nursing Degree, Master's Degree in Research and Advances in Preventive Medicine and Public Health and Master's Degree in Human Nutrition in the University of Granada. I have studied a Diploma in Epidemiology and Clinical Research and a Diploma of health management in the Andalusian School of Public Health (EASP).
I have worked as a research staff for 5 years in the PREDIMED PLUS project (Effect of a hypocaloric Mediterranean diet and physical activity promotion to prevent type 2 diabetes in people with metabolic syndrome) granted by FIBAO-FIS-Carlos III Health Institute.
My functions were: follow-up of participants, medical history review, individual consultation, anthropometric measurements, ECGs, blood pressure, ankle-brachial index determination, to complete and send questionnaires (nutritional, cognitive, psychopathological, quality of life, etc.), collection and handling processing of blood and other biological samples, notification of cardiovascular events to the committee, database analysis, queries resolution, face-to-face and group meetings with patients (clinical case presentation, motivational and coaching talks, nutrition and physical exercise workshops).
Since 2017 I have worked on the subproject "Evaluation of bone metabolism markers and their relationship with cardiovascular risk in a cohort of patients with metabolic syndrome", which results were published in my doctoral thesis. In this project, I had to handle DXA and Trabecular Bone Score (TBS) software to determine patients bone mineral density. I worked as well on the determination of bone metabolism biomarkers such as sclerostin and total and undercarboxylated osteocalcin by Elisa assay in the. In 2018 I was granted with a 3-month scholarship research stay at the Medical University of Vienna (Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology Waehringer Guertel) for a project called “Micro CT in rodents” with a grant by CIBER of Epidemiology and Public Health grant. In 2019 I started to collaborate on the project “Effect of capsinoid intake and exercise on energy metabolism and brown adipose tissue in adults. ActiFox” collecting blood samples and monitoring patients during the aerobic exercise training at maximal fat oxidation.