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

BACKGROUND: 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. METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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). CONCLUSIONS: 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.