Dietary patterns and surgically treated benign prostatic hyperplasia: a case control study in Western Australia

To investigate dietary patterns and food intake as risk factors for surgically treated benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), as few risk factors have been established for BPH and recently there has been some interest in a role for diet in the development of BPH.PATIENTS, SUBJECTS AND METHODSA case-control study was conducted in Western Australia (WA) during 2001 and 2002. BPH cases were men with a diagnosis of BPH hospitalized for their first prostatectomy. Controls were frequency matched for age and sex from the WA electoral roll. A previously evaluated food-frequency questionnaire (FFQ) collected information on usual dietary intake 10 years earlier. Factor analysis identified dietary patterns in the FFQ data. Effects of dietary patterns and food intakes on the risk of BPH were examined using unconditional logistic regression, adjusting for various confounders.RESULTSIn all, 406 cases and 462 controls (aged 40–75 years) provided data. Three dietary patterns were identified, i.e. \u27Vegetable\u27, \u27Western\u27 and \u27Health Conscious\u27. BPH risk was not associated with the \u27Health Conscious\u27 or \u27Western\u27 patterns, but there was a lower risk with an increasing score for the \u27Vegetable\u27 pattern (odds ratio 0.78, 95% confidence interval 0.63–0.98). BPH risk was significantly and inversely related to the intake of total vegetables, dark yellow vegetables, other vegetables, tofu and red meat. There was a higher risk of BPH with increasing intake of high-fat dairy products.CONCLUSIONSThese results indicate that vegetables, soy products, red meat and high-fat dairy foods might be important in the development of BPH