Healthy diet associated with better asthma outcomes in elderly women of the French Asthma-E3N study

PURPOSE: The impact of a healthy diet on asthma prevention and management, particularly among elderly women, remains poorly understood. We investigated whether a healthy diet would be associated with fewer asthma symptoms, and, among women with asthma, with reduced uncontrolled asthma and metabolic-related multimorbidity. METHODS: We included 12,991 elderly women (mean age = 63 years) from the Asthma-E3N study, a nested case–control study within the French E3N cohort. Negative binomial regressions were used to analyse associations between a healthy diet [evaluated by the Alternate Healthy Eating Index-2010 (AHEI-2010)] and a validated asthma symptom score, and logistic regressions to analyse associations between the AHEI-2010 with the asthma control test and multimorbidity profiles previously identified by clustering methods on medications used. RESULTS: After adjustment for potential confounders, a linear inverse association was found between the AHEI-2010 score and the asthma symptom score [mean score ratio (95% CI) = 0.82 (0.75–0.90) for the highest versus lowest quintile; p for trend < 0.0001]. In addition, women in the highest versus lowest AHEI-2010 tertile were at a lower risk to belong to the “Predominantly metabolic multimorbidity-related medications profile” compared to the “Few multimorbidity-related medications" profile [OR 0.80 (0.63–1.00) for tertile 3; p for trend = 0.05; n = 3474]. CONCLUSION: Our results show that a healthy dietary intake could play an important role in the prevention and management of asthma over the life course. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00394-022-02815-0.