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Incident HF risk reduced in adults with plant-based diet
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A plant-based diet had an inverse association with incident HF risk compared with the southern diet, which had a positive risk for incident HF, according to findings published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Kyla M. Lara, MD, MS, and colleagues sought to determine associations of five dietary patterns with incident HF hospitalizations among U.S. adults.
“The need for population-based preventive strategies for heart failure is critical,” Lara, a cardiology fellow at Mayo Clinic, who was at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai when the study was conducted, said in a press release. “These findings support a population-based strategy for lowering the risk of incident heart failure.”
The researchers analyzed data from the REGARDS study consisting of a cohort of black and white adults followed from 2003 to 2007 and through 2014. Inclusion criteria included no baseline CHD or HF and completion of a food frequency questionnaire.
The cohort was stratified into five dietary patterns — convenience, plant-based, sweets, Southern, and alcohol/salads. The primary endpoint was incident HF hospitalization.
The researchers included 16,068 participants in the study (mean age, 64 years; 59% women, 34% black, 34% from the stroke belt). There was a median follow-up of 8.7 years, during which 363 participants had incident HF hospitalizations.
Compared with the lowest quartile, the highest quartile of adherence to the plant-based dietary pattern was associated with a 41% lower risk for HF in multivariable-adjusted models (HR = 0.59; 95% CI, 0.41-0.86), Lara and colleagues wrote.
Higher adherence to the Southern dietary pattern was associated with a 72% higher risk for HF following adjustments for age, sex, race and other potential confounders (HR = 1.72; 95% CI, 1.2-2.46), the researchers wrote.
The association was attenuated after adjusting for various factors including BMI, waist circumference, hypertension, diabetes, AF and chronic kidney disease, Lara and colleagues wrote.
There was no association between HF hospitalization and the other three dietary patterns.
In a related editorial, Dong D. Wang, ScD, MD, a research fellow at the department of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, wrote: “The authors’ finding on the potentially differential associations of dietary patterns with HFpEF as compared with HFrEF provides an early glimpse of precision dietary prevention of HF (ie, recommending dietary approaches customized to HF subtypes with different pathophysiological basis). However, to achieve the precision prevention of HF, much research is needed to accrue robust and reproducible evidence.” – by Earl Holland Jr.
Disclosures: Lara and Wang report no relevant financial disclosures. Please see the study for all other authors’ relevant financial disclosures.
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