Dietary patterns and breast cancer: a review with focus on methodological issues

Abstract

Available information on dietary patterns (multiple dietary components operationalized as a single exposure) and cancer is still sparse. This review presents papers published to date that have identified dietary patterns according to all the existing approaches and have assessed their association with breast cancer. Nineteen articles published since 1995 were identified based on studies conducted in various populations across many countries. The majority of them identified a posteriori dietary patterns, mainly using principal component factor analysis. Six studies did not find associations between any of the identified dietary patterns and breast cancer. Nine studies identified one dietary pattern significantly associated with breast cancer, and the remaining four identified two to four dietary patterns related to breast cancer. Although the body of literature has recently increased, a meaningful assessment of the association between dietary patterns and breast cancer still calls for extra effort to refine the statistical techniques and to address the issue of reproducibility of dietary patterns.

Dietary patterns and breast cancer risk in a prospective Japanese study

“…This result appears to contradict previous studies results which regarded the Western or meat patterns as BC risk [7,10,11]. However, we need to interpret our results with caution; the "animal food pattern" and Western dietary patterns differ in several regards.…”

“…Although several epidemiologic studies have investigated associations between dietary patterns and BC risk [7,10,11], those dietary patterns may represent eating habits in a particular study population that are not applicable across other populations. Moreover, individual food preferences are modified by cultural, social, environmental, lifestyle and economic determinants [12].…”

Dietary patterns and breast cancer risk among women

“…Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer and the leading cause of cancer mortality among women worldwide (1) . Although the incidence of female breast cancer in most Asian countries is much lower than that in Western societies (2) , the rate has increased steadily in recent years (2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7) .…”

Is Usual Dietary Pattern Related to the Risk of Developing Breast Cancer?

“…A priori methods are scoredriven and hypothesis-oriented. These methods frequently use predetermined scores or indices that reflect nutritionrelated guidelines (e.g., HEI-2005) [4,5]. Many types of scores and indices exist, and as a result, they emphasize slightly different foods (HEI-2005 vs. Mediterranean Diet Score), which make comparing dietary patterns across these scoring methods challenging.…”

“…A posterori methods are data-driven and used to reduce the dietary data into a small set of uncorrelated variables that are more easily interpretable [4]. The data-driven approach often is considered to be "exploratory" [4].…”