Diet Quality and Risk of Lung Cancer in the Multiethnic Cohort Study

Diet quality, assessed by the Healthy Eating Index-2015 (HEI-2015), the Alternative Healthy Eating Index-2010 (AHEI-2010), the alternate Mediterranean Diet (aMED) score, the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) score, and the Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII^®), was examined in relation to risk of lung cancer in the Multiethnic Cohort Study. The analysis included 179,318 African Americans, Native Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, Latinos, and Whites aged 45-75 years, with 5350 incident lung cancer cases during an average follow-up of 17.5 ± 5.4 years. In multivariable Cox models comprehensively adjusted for cigarette smoking, the hazard ratios (95% confidence intervals) for the highest vs. lowest quality group based on quintiles were as follows: 0.85 (0.77-0.93) for HEI-2015; 0.84 (0.77-0.92) for AHEI-2010; 0.83 (0.76-0.91) for aMED; 0.83 (0.73-0.91) for DASH; and 0.90 (0.82-0.99) for DII. In histological cell type-specific analyses, the inverse association was stronger for squamous cell carcinoma than for adeno-, small cell, and large cell carcinomas for all indexes. There was no indication of differences in associations by sex, race/ethnicity, and smoking status. These findings support that high-quality diets are associated with lower risk of lung cancer, especially squamous cell carcinomas, in a multiethnic population.