The Association between Dietary Carbohydrate Intake and Pancreatic Cancer Risk: A Large Prospective Study

BackgroundPancreatic cancer (PC) is ranked as the 7th Leading cause of cancer death in the world and is among one of the most deadly cancers. Several lines of evidence indicate that insulin resistance, diabetes, and obesity are implicated in its carcinogenesis process.
Methods and MethodsWe examined the association between consumption of carbohydrate foods and risk of PC in the 50,045 participants (21241 men and 28804 women aged 40 to 75 years) of the Golestan Cohort Study in northeastern Iran. Dietary data was collected using a validated semi-quantitative food-frequency questionnaire. Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate multivariate hazard ratio with 95% confidence interval.
Results During 8.5 years (383,630 person-years) of follow-up and after excluding participants with incomplete data, a total of 48,676 adults (20,683 men and 27,993 women) were studied. Until October 30, 2014, 54 cases of pancreatic cancer were confirmed by a medical team, based the medical records and the exact cause of death based on ICD10 criteria. After adjusting for age, total energy intake, history of diabetes, smoking status, education, opium, body mass index, waist to hip ratio, ethnicity, gender, MET, residential area and socioeconomic status we did not observe any statistically significant relationship between consumption of total carbohydrate and carbohydrate foods including whole grains and refined grains, sugars and potatoes and risk of PC.
ConclusionBased on the results of the present study, dietary intake of total carbohydrate as well as various carbohydrate food sources had no significant association with the risk of PC. Finally, given the limited number of studies in this field and their inconclusive results, there is still a need for new prospective studies with long follow up.