The inflammatory potential of diet and ovarian cancer risk: results from two prospective cohort studies

We used a food-based empirical dietary inflammatory pattern (EDIP) score to investigate whether diets with higher inflammatory potential are associated with increased ovarian cancer risk.

We followed 186 314 women in the Nurses' Health Study and Nurses' Health Study-II, from 1984 to 2013, to examine associations between EDIP scores and ovarian cancer risk, using Cox regression analyses.

During 3 454 514 person-years of follow-up, 989 ovarian cancer cases were identified. In pooled multivariable-adjusted analyses, higher EDIP scores (more pro-inflammatory diets) were not significantly associated with ovarian cancer risk (HR_quintile5vs1 0.99; 95% CI: 0.80-1.22; P-trend=0.97). Similarly, we found no evidence of heterogeneity by histologic subtype (P-heterogeneity=0.52) or by tumour aggressiveness (P-heterogeneity=0.63).

In contrast with two previous case-control studies that found a positive association between a literature-derived nutrient-based dietary inflammatory index and ovarian cancer risk, our prospective analyses using a food-based score observed no evidence of an association.