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DASH diet reduced women’s risk for heart failure

Women benefited even if they did not exactly follow the DASH diet.

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The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet, designed to prevent and treat hypertension, may also be associated with a lower risk of heart failure among women, according to a report published in yesterday’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

Researchers analyzed data from 36,019 women aged 48 to 83 without heart failure who were participating in the Swedish Mammogrpahy Cohort. The women completed a food frequency questionnaire at the beginning of the study, between 1997 and 1998, which was used to calculate a score indicating how closely their diets matched DASH guidelines. The women were followed up from 1998 to 2004 using Swedish databases of hospitalizations and deaths.

During the seven-year follow-up, 443 women developed heart failure, including 415 who were hospitalized and 28 who died. Compared with the one-fourth of women with the lowest DASH diet scores, the one-fourth of women with the highest DASH diet scores had a 37% lower rate of heart failure after factors such as age, physical activity and smoking were considered. Women whose scores placed them in the top 10% had half the rate of heart failure compared with the one-fourth of women who had the lowest scores.

Previous studies of the DASH diet have demonstrated a reduction in systolic blood pressure by about 5.5 mm Hg, which this study’s researchers note could reduce the rate of heart failure by about 12%. The diet also reduces LDL and oxygen-related cell damage while providing estrogen-like effects from some of the nutrients consumed.

Emily Levitan, ScD, a research fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said the women’s diet did not have to exactly mirror the DASH diet to have a benefit. “Very few of the women we looked at had diets that shared all aspects of the DASH diet,” she said in a press release. “But we found that the closer they were, the lower their risk of heart failure."

“This suggests that making even moderate adjustments to your diet to include more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products, and less salt and sugar and less red meat and processed meats, can help improve cardiac health,” she said.

Levitan E. Arch Intern Med. 2009;169:851-857.