Mediterranean diet and cardiovascular disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies

Abstract

Our findings indicate and further quantify that MD exerts a protective effect on the risk of CVD. This inverse association includes CHD and ischemic stroke, but apparently not hemorrhagic stroke.

Inflammageing: chronic inflammation in ageing, cardiovascular disease, and frailty

“…In observational studies, adherence to the Mediterranean diet was the only behavioural factor consistently associated with a lower risk of frailty, which might be a result of the anti-inflammatory properties inherent to the diet 247,248 . Underlying the relationship between CVD and frailty, the Mediterranean diet is also one of the few behavioural interventions that, in both observational studies and clinical trials, was associated with lower cardiovascular morbidity and mortality 249,250 . Aspirin, a potent anti-inflammatory molecule, is effective in the treatment of acute myocardial infarction and in secondary prevention of CVD, and some evidence indicates that aspirin might be effective in primary prevention of myocardial infarction, at least in high-risk groups 251,252 .…”

Mediterranean diet and health status: Active ingredients and pharmacological mechanisms

“…Recent meta-analyses mostly confirm the favourable associations of adhering to a MedDiet (Chen et al, 2019;Eleftheriou et al, 2018;Kojima, Avgerinou, Iliffe, & Walters, 2018;Rosato et al, 2019;Shafiei, Salari-Moghaddam, Larijani, & Esmaillzadeh, 2019), although the corresponding data are predominantly based on observational studies.…”

“…Recent meta‐analyses mostly confirm the favourable associations of adhering to a MedDiet (Chen et al, ; Eleftheriou et al, ; Kojima, Avgerinou, Iliffe, & Walters, ; Rosato et al, ; Shafiei, Salari‐Moghaddam, Larijani, & Esmaillzadeh, ), although the corresponding data are predominantly based on observational studies. On the one hand, critical summaries of observational studies together with RCTs yielded consistent results with respect to the health benefits of a MedDiet (Martinez‐Gonzalez, Gea, & Ruiz‐Canela, ).…”

Health Economic Evaluation Modeling Shows Potential Health Care Cost Savings with Increased Conformance with Healthy Dietary Patterns among Adults in the United States

“…Fifteen were either earlier publications from the same group of researchers with updates available, included fewer individual cohort studies in the summary risk estimates, or were high vs low comparisons of risk of a health outcome when a doseeresponse analysis for the same health outcome was available. A summary of the seven studies (2 studies with HEI 21,22 and 5 studies with MED [23][24][25][26][27] ) included in the current model is provided in Table 1. It is important to note that based on the inclusion criteria, no studies on the association between conformance with a vegetarian dietary pattern and health outcomes were identified.…”

“…based on a meta-analysis that summarized the effect of the MED on unspecified cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease/myocardial infarction, and stroke (unspecified, ischemic, and hemorrhagic) incidence and mortality. 23 The objective of the current study was to evaluate potential savings in health care costs among the US healthy adult population, so the risk estimate associated with the non-Mediterranean cohorts in the most recent meta-analysis 23 was selected for inclusion in the analysis (ie, RR 0.84, 95% CI 0.77 to 0.92). In the same meta-analysis, MED was inversely associated with incidence of coronary heart disease/myocardial infarction when comparing individuals in the highest conformance quantile to those in the lowest conformance quantile restricted to non-Mediterranean populations only (RR 0.79, 95% CI 0.70 to 0.89) with no heterogeneity.…”