Pickled Vegetable and Salted Fish Intake and the Risk of Gastric Cancer: Two Prospective Cohort Studies and a Meta-Analysis

An increased risk of gastric cancer for pickled vegetable and salted fish intake has been suggested, yet the lack of a dose-response association warrants a quantitative analysis. We conducted a meta-analysis, combining results from our analysis of two large Korean cohort studies and those from previous prospective cohort studies. We investigated the association of pickled vegetable and salted fish intake with gastric cancer in the Korean Genome Epidemiology Study and the Korean Multi-center Cancer Cohort Study using Cox proportional hazard models. We then searched for observational studies published until November 2019 and conducted both dose-response and categorical meta-analyses. The pooled relative risk (RR) of gastric cancer incidence was 1.15 (95% Confidence Interval (CI), 1.07–1.23) for 40 g/day increment in pickled vegetable intake in a dose-response manner (P for nonlinearity = 0.11). As for salted fish intake, the pooled risk of gastric cancer incidence was 1.17 (95% CI, 0.99–1.38) times higher, comparing the highest to the lowest intake. Our findings supported the evidence that high intake of pickled vegetable and salted fish is associated with elevated risk of gastric cancer incidence.