Diet high in fruit associated with lower risk of neovascular AMD

Consumption of fruit — specifically bananas and oranges — may help ward off the development of neovascular age-related macular degeneration, data from a large cohort study suggest.

Other dietary elements tracked in the study — intake of vegetables, antioxidant vitamins and carotenoids — were not strongly associated with either early or neovascular AMD, the study’s authors said.

Eunyoung Cho, ScD, and colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston prospectively studied 77,562 women enrolled in the Nurses Health Study and 40,866 men enrolled in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. All participants were at least 50 years of age at baseline and had no diagnosis of AMD or cancer for at least 18 years for the women and at least 12 for the men. Intake of fruit and vegetables was assessed up to 5 times for women and up to 3 times for men during the follow-up period.

The researchers identified 329 women and 135 men with incident cases of early AMD and 217 women and 99 men with neovascular AMD during the course of the study. Visual acuity in all these subjects was 20/30 or worse primarily because of AMD.

Fruit intake was inversely associated with the risk of neovascular AMD, the researchers found. Participants who consumed three or more servings of fruit a day had a pooled multivariate relative risk of 0.64 compared with those who consumed less than 1.5 servings of fruit daily. These findings were similar for both sexes. A nonsignificant inverse association between fruit intake and early AMD was found.

In examining whether specific fruits were related to the risk of neovascular AMD, “only higher intakes of oranges and bananas achieved statistical significance,” the authors said in the June issue of Archives of Ophthalmology. Banana intake was also inversely related to early AMD, the researchers found. The pooled multivariate relative risk for participants who consumed three or more servings per week of banana was 0.67 compared with those who consumed less than two servings per month, they reported

In this study, the authors said, intakes of antioxidant vitamins or carotenoids either from food or from food and supplements were not strongly related to AMD risk. Vegetable intake was also not related to development of either early or neovascular AMD in men or women.

The researchers suggested that follow-up studies are needed to confirm their findings.