Purpose To assess relationships between the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH), Mediterranean Diet (MD), Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII®) and Energy-adjusted DII (E-DII™) scores and pro-inflammatory cytokines, adipocytokines, acute-phase response proteins, coagulation factors and white blood cells. Methods This was a cross-sectional study of 1862 men and women aged 46–73 years, randomly selected from a large primary care centre in Ireland. DASH, MD, DII and E-DII scores were derived from validated food frequency questionnaires. Correlation and multivariate-adjusted linear regression analyses with correction for multiple testing were performed to examine dietary score relationships with biomarker concentrations. Results In fully adjusted models, higher diet quality or a less pro-inflammatory diet was associated with lower concentrations of c-reactive protein, neutrophils (all dietary scores), complement component 3 C3, interleukin 6 IL-6, tumour necrosis factor-alpha TNF-α, white blood cell count WBC, the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio NLR (DASH, DII and E-DII), monocytes (DASH and DII) and resistin (DII and E-DII). After accounting for multiple testing, relationships with C3 (DASH: β = − 2.079, p = .011 and DII: β = 2.521, p = .036), IL-6 (DASH: β = − 0.063, p = .011), TNF-α (DASH: β = − 0.027, p = .034), WBC (DASH: β = − 0.028, p = .001 and DII: β = 0.029, p = .02), neutrophils (DASH: β = − 0.041, p = .001; DII: β = 0.043, p = .007; E-DII: β = 0.029, p = .009) and the NLR (DASH: β = − 0.035, p = .011) persisted. Conclusions Better diet quality, determined by the DASH score, may be more closely associated with inflammatory biomarkers related to health in middle- to older-aged adults than the MD, DII and E-DII scores.
Miller et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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