Healthy diet reduces heart failure risk

Summary

The Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension diet lowers blood pressure and low density
lipoprotein cholesterol.

This might be expected to decrease the risk of heart failure and a study of Swedish women
shows that those who most closely adhered to this dietary approach halved their heart failure
risk.

Introduction

A diet rich in fruit, vegetables, low-fat dairy products and whole grains has been shown to be
healthy, particularly when it comes to lowering blood pressure. This is the basis of the Dietary
Approach to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, whose benefit to health has been proven in
numerous studies. Lowering blood pressure is expected to be beneficial to heart health, but
the impact of the DASH diet on heart failure risk has not previously been studied.

What was done

A team at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, studied data from over 36,000
women aged 48 to 83 who were in the Swedish Mammography Cohort. The women did a
food frequency questionnaire between 1997 and 1998 to indicate how close their diet was to
the DASH diet. They were then followed up from 1998 to 2004 with respect to
hospitalizations and death.

What was found

During follow up, 443 women developed heart failure, of whom 28 died of the condition.
Comparing the one quarter of women with the highest DASH scores to the one quarter with
the lowest scores revealed that those in the former group had a 37% reduced risk of heart
failure, and those in the top 10% had a 50% reduced risk. This was after controlling for other
factors like age, physical activity and smoking.

What this study means

The DASH diet can lower systolic (top number) blood pressure by 5.5 mm Hg, which might
be expected to reduce heart failure risk by 12%. Also, the DASH diet reduces low-density
lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL, or ‘bad’ cholesterol) which could also reduce the risk of heart
failure. The findings suggest yet another reason for following a healthy diet.