Dietary Patterns and Risk of Stroke in Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies

BackgroundThe effect of whole diet on the development of stroke has recently achieved much interest by various prospective studies, but with inconclusive results. Herein, we carried this meta-analysis to identify the potential associations between different dietary patterns and the risk of stroke by pooling available data from existing studies.MethodsPubMed and EBSCO were searched for pertinent articles that identify dietary patterns published from January 1991 to November 2014, with the following keywords: dietary pattern, dietary patterns, food pattern, eating pattern, alcohol drinking, alcohol consumption, and stroke.ResultsA total of 21 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in this meta-analysis. A decreased risk of stroke was shown for the highest compared with the lowest categories of healthy dietary pattern (odds ratio [OR] = .77; 95% confidence interval [CI] = .63-.93; P < .00001) and light–moderate drinking pattern (OR = .80; 95% CI = .72-.90; P = .0002). There was evidence of the increase in the risk of stroke in the highest compared with heavy alcohol-drinking pattern (OR = 1.25; 95% CI = 1.17-1.33; P < .00001), whereas no significant association with Western-style dietary pattern was observed (OR = 1.05; 95% CI = .82-1.35; P = .70).ConclusionsThe results of this meta-analysis indicated that some dietary patterns may be associated with the risk of stroke.