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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Sharon Saydah, PhD, Office of Analysis and Epidemiology, National Center for Health Statistics, 3311 Toledo Road, Hyattsville, MD 20782, 301-458-4183, ssaydah@cdc.gov and Catherine Loria, PhD, MS, MA, Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Applications, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, 6701 Rockledge Dr., Room 8112, Bethesda, MD 20892.

Although previous studies using data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) have examined the association of disease risk factors with dietary patterns, none have had a longitudinal component. The new linkage of NHANES III data to death records allows the comparison of dietary patterns and risk of subsequent mortality in a nationally representative sample. The analysis included participants age 20 years and older who had complete information on 24-hour dietary recall, had no history of chronic disease, were not pregnant or lactating and did not report an extremely low or high calorie diet (n = 13,947). We compared three different measures of dietary patterns: Healthy Eating Index (HEI), DASH diet, Naturally Nutrient Rich (NNR) diet. Participants were divided into quintiles for each dietary and all-cause, heart disease and cancer mortality was compared for the lower quintiles to the highest quintile. After adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, smoking status, vitamin use and physical activity, neither HEI nor DASH was significantly associated with a decreased or increased risk of mortality. Participants in the lowest quintile of the NNR diet had the greatest risk of mortality even after adjustment (p for trend 0.03). Similar patterns were observed for all-cause, heart disease and cancer mortality. These results suggest the specific nutrient composition, as opposed to specific food groups, of the diet may be an indicator of mortality risk and provide an example of research that is possible using the NHANES III linked mortality file.

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