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Dietary patterns and breast cancer risk: results from three cohort studies in the DIETSCAN project

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Abstract

Objective: Only a few consistent findings on individual foods or nutrients that influence breast cancer risk have emerged thus far. Since people do not consume individual foods but certain combinations of them, the analysis of dietary patterns may offer an additional aspect for assessing associations between diet and diseases such as breast cancer. It is also important to examine whether the relationships between dietary patterns and breast cancer risk are consistent across populations.

Methods: We examined the risk of breast cancer with two dietary patterns, identified as “Vegetables” (VEG) and “Pork, Processed Meat, Potatoes” (PPP), common to all cohorts of the DIETSCAN project. During 7 to 13 years of follow-up, three of the cohorts – the Netherlands Cohort Study on diet and cancer (NLCS), the Swedish Mammography Cohort (SMC), and the Ormoni e Dieta nella Eziologia dei Tumori (Italy-ORDET) – provided data on 3271 breast cancer cases with complete information on their baseline diet measured by a validated food frequency questionnaire.

Results: After adjustment for potential confounders, VEG was not associated with the risk of breast cancer across all cohorts. PPP was also not associated with the risk of breast cancer in SMC and ORDET, but a high PPP score tended to be inversely associated with breast cancer in the NLCS study (RR  = 0.69; 95% CI, 0.52–0.92, highest versus lowest quartile). PPP differed in one aspect between the cohorts: butter loaded positively on the pattern in all cohorts except NLCS, in which butter loaded negatively and appeared to be substituted by low-fat margarine loading positively.

Conclusion: In general, the dietary patterns showed consistent results across the three cohorts except for the possible protective effect of PPP in the NLCS cohort, which could be explained by a difference in that pattern for NLCS. The results supported the suggestion derived from traditional epidemiology that relatively recent diet may not have an important role in the etiology of breast cancer.

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Abbreviations

ATBC:

Alpha-Tocopherol Beta-Carotene Cancer Prevention Study

DIETSCAN:

DIETary patternS and CANcer in four European countries

FFQ:

Food frequency questionnaire

NLCS:

Netherlands Cohort Study on Diet and Cancer

ORDET:

Ormoni e Dieta nella Eziologia dei Tumori

SMC:

Swedish Mammography Cohort

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Epidemiology and Health Promotion, National Public Health Institute, Mannerheimintie 166, FIN-00300, Helsinki, Finland

    Satu Männistö, Mikko J. Virtanen & Pirjo Pietinen

  2. Department of Nutrition, Food studies and Public Health, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    L. Beth Dixon

  3. Department of Nutritional Epidemiology, TNO Nutrition and Food Research, Zeist, The Netherlands

    Helena F. Balder & R. Alexandra Goldbohm

  4. Epidemiology Unit, Instituto Nazionale per lo Studio e la Cura dei Tumori, Milan, Italy

    Vittorio Krogh & Franco Berrino

  5. Institute of Environmental Epidemiology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

    Bahram Rashid Khani & Alicja Wolk

  6. Department of Epidemiology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Piet A. van den Brandt

  7. Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA

    L. Beth Dixon & Anne M. Hartman

  8. Department of Methodology and Statistics, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Frans Tan

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  1. Satu Männistö
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  2. L. Beth Dixon
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Correspondence to Satu Männistö.

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Männistö, S., Dixon, L.B., Balder, H.F. et al. Dietary patterns and breast cancer risk: results from three cohort studies in the DIETSCAN project. Cancer Causes Control 16, 725–733 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-005-1763-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-005-1763-7

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