Does the Mediterranean dietary pattern or the Healthy Diet Index influence the risk of breast cancer in a large British cohort of women?

Abstract

Background/Objective: To assess the risk of developing breast cancer associated with consumption of two common dietary patterns: a Mediterranean dietary pattern and a dietary pattern, which conforms to the World Health Organization Healthy Diet Index (WHO HDI). Subjects/Methods: Dietary data from a 217-item food frequency questionnaire were used to generate two dietary patterns according to pre-defined criteria in women from the UK Women's Cohort Study. Survival analysis using Cox regression was used to estimate hazards ratios for risk of breast cancer adjusted for known confounders.Results: This analysis included 828 incident cases of breast cancer in 33 731 women with a mean follow-up of 9 years. There were no statistically significant associations between either the Mediterranean dietary pattern or the WHO HDI and risk of breast cancer. In premenopausal women, there was a nonsignificant trend suggesting that increasing compliance with the Mediterranean diet was associated with lower risk of breast cancer. Maximal adherence to the Mediterranean diet was associated with hazards ratio ¼ 0.65 (95% confidence interval: 0.42-1.02, P trend ¼ 0.09) compared with minimal adherence. In postmenopausal women, no clear trends were observed. Conclusions: In this study, no strong association between the risk of breast cancer and the consumption of either a Mediterranean-type diet or one characterized by adherence to the WHO HDI was observed. In premenopausal, but not postmenopausal women, there was a nonsignificant inverse association with increasing adherence to the Mediterranean diet pattern.

Adherence to the mediterranean diet and risk of breast cancer in the European prospective investigation into cancer and nutrition cohort study

“…7 Epidemiological research into the effect of an a priori MD pattern on BC remains limited. To our knowledge, three cohort studies (based on the United Kingdom, 8 Greece 9 and the United States 10 ) and two population-based case-control What's new? Many factors can affect susceptibility to breast cancer, including menopausal status and diet.…”

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

“…This study found that the "Vegetable, Fruit, Milk, Poultry, and Fish" pattern, derived via PCA, was inversely associated with breast cancer (OR Q4vsQ4 =0.26; 95 % CI 0.17-0.42; p trend ≤0.001). Two studies [13,21] found no association and two studies [12,23] found a positive association between healthy dietary patterns and breast cancer risk. Buck and colleagues [21] conducted a large population-based case-control study in postmenopausal German women to examine PCAderived dietary patterns and breast cancer risk.…”

“…Weak associations were observed between some of the individual components of both of the Mediterranean diet scoring methods and cancer risk; however, when combining the components into a dietary pattern, those with the highest adherence to the Mediterranean dietary pattern had significantly lower odds of developing cancer compared with those in the lowest quartile of adherence (odds ratio (OR) Q4vs.Q1 0.67; 95 % confidence interval (CI) 0.49-0.92; p trend ≤0.0001). Cade et al [13] also examined adherence to the Mediterranean Diet Score (MDS) and the World Health Organization Healthy Diet Index (WHO-HDI) and breast cancer risk in a cohort of 33,731 premenopausal and postmenopausal women from the United Kingdom Women's Cohort Study. The MDS was defined by Trichopolou and colleagues [15] and placed emphasis on legumes, fruits, vegetables, and fish among other foods.…”

“…This diet is associated with a lower risk of several chronic diseases, including cancer and heart disease [8][9][10]. Three recent studies have examined the Mediterranean dietary pattern and its association with breast cancer risk [11][12][13]. Both a priori and a posteriori methods were used.…”

“…Five studies [12,[20][21][22][23] used a posteriori methods, and one study [13] used an a priori method (WHO Healthy Diet Index) to identify "healthy" dietary patterns and examine associations with breast cancer risk. Two studies examined the relationship between dietary patterns and breast cancer risk in Chinese [22] and Australian [20] women and observed significant inverse associations between healthy dietary patterns and breast cancer risk.…”