Dietary patterns and the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma: the Multiethnic Cohort

We examined dietary patterns and the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in the Multiethnic Cohort, which includes more than 215,000 Caucasians, African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Latinos aged 45-75 at baseline. All subjects completed a validated food-frequency questionnaire. After a median follow-up time of 10 years, we identified 939 incident NHL cases through linkages with tumor registries. Three patterns, "Vegetables,""Fruit and Milk," and "Fat and Meat," were analyzed using Cox regression. None of the patterns was significantly associated with the risk of NHL in the total population. However, the Vegetables pattern was inversely related to risk in Caucasian women with a hazard ratio of 0.56 (P(trend) = 0.04), and the Fat and Meat pattern was associated with a fivefold higher risk of follicular lymphoma in men (P(trend) = 0.03). The lack of significant results in men and women indicates a limited role of diet in NHL etiology, but dietary patterns might have ethnic- and subgroup-specific effects on NHL.