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Investigating the associations of glycemic load and glycemic index with lung cancer risk in the Southern Community Cohort Study

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Abstract

Purpose

Diets with a high glycemic load (GL) or glycemic index (GI) may increase cancer risk. Findings from prior studies on the relationship between GL, GI, and lung cancer risk are inconsistent. We investigated this relationship in a large prospective cohort.

Methods

We analyzed data from the Southern Community Cohort Study, a prospective cohort that includes diverse racial groups predominantly low-income adults aged 40–79 in 12 southeastern states of the USA. We estimated dietary GL and GI values using data collected from food frequency questionnaires at baseline. Dietary GL and GI were energy adjusted by residual method and categorized into sex-specific quintiles. Cox proportional hazard regression was used to assess the associations between dietary GL, GI, and lung cancer risk. We further performed stratified analyses by various factors.

Results

Intakes of individual food items or food groups that commonly contribute to GL were similar between blacks and whites in the cohort. After excluding the first two years of follow-up, 947 incident lung cancers were ascertained among 55,068 participants. Neither dietary GL nor GI was significantly associated with incident lung cancer risk in the overall population (GL: Q5 vs. Q1, HR = 0.88, 95% CI 0.72–1.07, ptrend = 0.29; GI: Q5 vs. Q1, HR = 1.06, 95% CI 0.86–1.30, ptrend = 0.71), nor in subgroups of populations (ptrend > 0.05), in multivariable-adjusted analyses.

Conclusion

Dietary GL and GI were not independently associated with incident lung cancer risk in a large understudied population.

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Data availability

Data and material will be available to collaborators when an appropriate request is submitted to and approved by the SCCS Data and Biospecimen Use Committee.

Code availability

The SAS code is available when an appropriate request is made to Dr. Xiang Shu (ShuX@mskcc.org).

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Acknowledgments

The Southern Community Cohort Study (SCCS) is funded by Grant U01 CA202979 from the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health. SCCS data collection was performed by the Survey and Biospecimen Shared Resource which is supported in part by the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (P30 CA68485). Dr. Xiang Shu is partially supported by Grant K99 CA230205-01A1 (PI: Xiang Shu) during the project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Epidemiology, Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA

    Xiang Shu, Danxia Yu, Xiao-ou Shu, Wei Zheng & William J. Blot

  2. Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA

    Xiang Shu

  3. Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA

    Xiao-ou Shu, Wei Zheng & William J. Blot

  4. International Epidemiology Institute, Rockville, MD, USA

    Heather M. Munro

  5. Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA

    William J. Blot

Authors
  1. Xiang Shu
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  2. Danxia Yu
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  3. Xiao-ou Shu
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  4. Heather M. Munro
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  5. Wei Zheng
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  6. William J. Blot
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Contributions

XS: study design, method development, statistical analysis, manuscript preparation, and result interpretation; DY: method development, result interpretation, and manuscript revision; XoS: result interpretation and manuscript revision; HMM: data management and method development; WZ: study design, data collection, result interpretation, and manuscript revision; WJB: study design, data collection, result interpretation, and manuscript revision.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiang Shu.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

Both Institutional Review Boards at Vanderbilt University and Meharry Medical College approved the SCCS, and we collected written informed consent from all participants.

Informed consent

The written consent form was obtained from all SCCS participants at the baseline enrollment. All the authors have reviewed the manuscript and agreed with the contents for publication.

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Shu, X., Yu, D., Shu, Xo. et al. Investigating the associations of glycemic load and glycemic index with lung cancer risk in the Southern Community Cohort Study. Cancer Causes Control 31, 1069–1077 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-020-01344-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-020-01344-7

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