Healthy diet helps prevent diverticulitis in women

Women who adhere to a healthy dietary pattern have a reduced risk of incident diverticulitis, reports a study. Eating nuts and seeds also does not significantly increase such risk.

A total of 1,531 cases of incident diverticulitis were identified over 415,103 person-years of follow-up. Consumption of peanuts, nuts, and seeds (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR], 1.07, 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 0.91–1.25), as well as fresh fruits with edible seeds (aHR, 1.06, 95 percent CI, 0.90–1.24), showed no significant association with incident diverticulitis.

Compared with women in the lowest quartile of healthy diets, those in the highest quartile showed a reduced risk for incident diverticulitis: Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet (aHR, 0.77, 95 percent CI, 0.65–0.90), Health Eating Index (aHR, 0.78, 95 percent CI, 0.66–0.91), Alternative Healthy Eating Index (aHR, 0.81, 95 percent CI, 0.69–0.95), and Alternative Mediterranean diet (aHR, 0.91, 95 percent CI, 0.78–1.06).

This prospective cohort study identified 29,916 women (aged 35–74 years at enrolment) who responded to food frequency and diverticulitis questionnaires and had no history of inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, or diverticulitis.

The investigators used food frequency questionnaires to calculate the dietary index scores and to examine the intake of nuts, seeds, and corn. They estimated the aHRs for the associations between each dietary component or dietary index and diverticulitis risk using Cox proportional hazards regression.

The study was limited by potential confounding, selection bias, and measurement bias.