Vegetable and fruit intake and non-Hodgkin lymphoma survival in Connecticut women.

[Guest guest]

Greetings,

Never a bad idea to include more fruits and vegetables in one's diet (to

improve one's general health and fitness) ... and this study shows that such

a diet is associated with better survival in lymphoma patients.

However, the obvious confounders would be that those who eat better (who

would be concerned about health) will also tend to me more fit (will

exercise more, not drink excessively, not smoke), and perhaps on average

will have more supportive social networks (meals cooked for you instead of

living on take out), so a direct causal association between this diet and

outcomes could not be demonstrated in such a study. Hence the words

" suggests " and " could be. "

But here's to eating well, and getting fit!

~ Karl

Leuk Lymphoma. 2010 Mar 30. [Epub ahead of print]

Vegetable and fruit intake and non-Hodgkin lymphoma survival in Connecticut

women.

Han X, Zheng T, Foss F, Holford TR, Ma S, Zhao P, Dai M, Kim C, Zhang Y, Bai

Y, Zhang Y.

School of Public Health, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.

Abstract

We investigated whether an increased intake of vegetables and fruits favors

NHL survival. A cohort of 568 female cases of incident NHL diagnosed during

1996-2000 in Connecticut was followed up for a median of 7.7 years. Adjusted

hazard ratios (HRs) were estimated by proportional hazard models. Our

results show that a pre-diagnostic high intake of vegetables appeared to

favor overall survival (HR = 0.74, 95% CI 0.57-0.98) among patients with NHL

who survived longer than 6 months. In particular, pre-diagnostic high

intakes of green leafy vegetables and citrus fruits were associated with 29%

(95% CI 0.51-0.98) and 27% (95% CI 0.54-0.99) reduced risk of death,

respectively. When different types of vegetables and fruits were

investigated separately, their impacts were found to vary in NHL subtypes.

Our study suggests that increasing vegetable and citrus fruit consumption

could be a useful strategy to improve survival in NHL patients.

PMID: 20350273

All the best,

~ Karl

Patients Against Lymphoma