healthy diet_inflamm_WHII [Am J Med].pdf (1.11 MB)
Long-term adherence to healthy dietary guidelines and chronic inflammation in the prospective Whitehall II study
journal contribution
posted on 2015-10-29, 14:17 authored by Tasnime N. Akbaraly, Martin J. Shipley, Jane E. Ferrie, Marianna Virtanen, Gordon Lowe, Mark Hamer, Mika KivimakiBACKGROUND: Inflammation plays an important role in the cause of cardiovascular diseases and may contribute
to the association linking an unhealthy diet to chronic age-related diseases. However, to date the long-term
associations between diet and inflammation have been poorly described. Our aim was to assess the extent to
which adherence to a healthy diet and dietary improvements over a 6-year exposure period prevented subsequent
chronic inflammation over a 5-year follow-up in a large British population of men and women.
METHODS: Data were drawn from 4600 adults (mean standard deviation, age 49.6 6.1 years, 28% were
women) from the prospective Whitehall cohort II study. Adherence to a healthy diet was measured using
Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI) scores in 1991-1993 (50.7 11.9 points) and 1997-1999 (51.6
12.4 points). Chronic inflammation, defined as average levels of serum interleukin-6 from 2 measures
5 years apart, was assessed in 1997-1999 and 2002-2004.
RESULTS: After adjustment for sociodemographic factors, health behaviors, and health status, participants
who maintained a high AHEI score (ie, a healthy diet, n ¼ 1736, 37.7%) and those who improved this score
over time (n ¼ 681, 14.8%) showed significantly lower mean levels of interleukin-6 (1.84 pg/mL, 95%
confidence interval [CI], 1.71-1.98 and 1.84 pg/mL, 95% CI, 1.70-1.99, respectively) than those who had a
low AHEI score (n ¼ 1594, 34.6%) over the 6-year exposure period (2.01 pg/mL, 95% CI, 1.87-2.17).
CONCLUSIONS: These data suggest that maintaining and improving adherence to healthy dietary recommendations
may reduce the risk of long-term inflammation.
Funding
The Whitehall II study is supported by grants from the British Medical Research Council (MR/K013351/1); the British Heart Foundation (PG/11/63/29011 and RG/13/2/30098); the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/J023299/1); the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01HL036310); the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health (R01AG013196 and R01AG034454); and the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (Grant HS06516). TA is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/J023299/1), the National Institutes of Health and by the Languedoc-Roussillon Region (Chercheur d’avenir Grant 2011). MJS is partly supported by the British Heart Foundation. MK is supported by the Medical Research Council (MR/K013351/1), the British Heart Foundation (PG/11/63/29011 and RG/13/2/30098), Academy of Finland, and a professorial fellowship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/ J023299/1).
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
American Journal of MedicineCitation
AKBARALY, T.N. ... et al., 2014. Long-term adherence to healthy dietary guidelines and chronic inflammation in the prospective Whitehall II study. American Journal of Medicine, 128 (2), pp. 152–160.e4Publisher
© The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/Publication date
2014Notes
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).ISSN
1555-7162Publisher version
Language
- en