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Better diet quality benefits vision, study finds
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Adherence to dietary guidelines was associated with a lowered long-term risk of visual impairments in a study recently published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology.
Hong and colleagues conducted a population-based study of 3,654 participants from the Blue Mountains Eye study. The participants were examined at baseline and after a period of 5 and 10 years.
Researchers measured best-correct visual acuity as well as dietary information.
"The Total Diet Score (TDS) was developed based on a modified version of the Australian diet quality index to assess adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Australian Adults and the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating," they noted.
The TDS included energy balance and diet quality, as detailed in the study.
Researchers utilized software and discrete logistic regression models to analyze collected data.
Of the 3,654 baseline participants, 1,963 completed the food frequency questionnaire, were suitable for analysis and participated in the 10-year follow-up and were included in the results.
Results showed that as the quality of a participant's diet improved, the risk for visual impairment decreased. Additionally, participants in the highest group of the TDS had a lower risk of visual impairment than participants in the lowest group. Researchers reported that the association was not significant in participants younger than 65 years but significant in participants at least 65 years old.
"In an older population-based cohort of Australians, we documented a possible long-term benefit on vision from higher diet quality, indicated by adherence to published dietary guidelines," the authors concluded. "Further research on diet and health outcomes including vision and ocular diseases is merited, given that dietary consumption is the most frequent, but modifiable, lifetime environmental exposure that affects health directly in the longer term."
Disclosure: The authors have no relevant financial disclosures.
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