%0 Journal Article
%T Mis-reporting, previous health status and health status of family may seriously bias the association between food patterns and disease
%A Agneta H£¿rnell
%A Anna Winkvist
%A G£¿ran Hallmans
%A Lars Weinehall
%A Ingegerd Johansson
%J Nutrition Journal
%D 2010
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1475-2891-9-48
%X The inhabitants of V£¿sterbotten County in northern Sweden are invited to health check-ups when they turn 30, 40, 50, and 60 years of age. The present study includes data collected from almost 60,000 individuals between 1992 and 2005. Associations between FPG (established using K-means cluster analyses) and health were analyzed separately in men and women.The health status of the participants and their close family and reporting accuracy differed significantly between men and women and among FPG. Crude regression analyses, with the high fat FPG as reference, showed increased risks for several health outcomes for all other FPGs in both sexes. However, when limiting analysis to individuals without previous ill-health and with adequate energy intake reports, most of the risks instead showed a trend towards protective effects.Food pattern classifications reflect both eating habits and other own and family health related factors, a finding important to remember and to adjust for before singling out the diet as a primary cause for present and future health problems. Appropriate exclusions are suggested to avoid biases and attenuated associations in nutrition epidemiology.Food pattern analyses have become popular in recent decades for the study of associations between diet and health, especially regarding prospective studies on all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) [1,2]. One reason for the popularity of this strategy is that it emphasizes the entire diet as opposed to single nutrients or foods.Accurate food intake information is needed for unbiased estimates of the impact of diet, including food patterns, on the etiology and progression of different diseases. Correct adjustments for individual characteristics likely related to both food patterns and later health outcomes (confounding factors) are required. Furthermore, dietary intake and measurement of health outcomes should be separated in time, i.e. assessed prospectively in epidemiological studies. Otherw
%U http://www.nutritionj.com/content/9/1/48