Background:
Dietary patterns better reflect eating habits as opposed to single dietary components. However, the use of
dietary pattern analysis in nutritional epidemiology has been hampered by the complexity of interpreting and presenting
multidimensional dietary data.
Methods:
This study extracts and visualizes dietary patterns from self-reported dietary data collected in mid-pregnancy (25
th
week of gestation) from nearly 60,000 mother-child pairs part of a prospective, longitudinal cohort (Danish National Birth
Cohort) and further examines their associations with spontaneous and induced preterm birth (gestational age
,
259 days
(
,
37 weeks)).
Results:
A total of seven dietary patterns were extracted by principal component analysis, characterized and visualized by
color-coded spider plots, and referred to as: Vegetables/Prudent, Alcohol, Western, Nordic, Seafood, Candy and Rice/Pasta/
Poultry. A consistent dose-response association with preterm birth was only observed for Western diet with an odds ratio of
1.30 (95% CI: 1.13, 1.49) comparing the highest to the lowest quintile. This association was primarily driven by induced
preterm deliveries (odds ratio = 1.66, 95% CI: 1.30, 2.11, comparing the highest to the lowest quintile) while the
corresponding odds ratio for spontaneous preterm deliveries was more modest (odds ratio = 1.18, 95% CI: 0.99, 1.39). All
based on adjusted analyses.
Conclusions:
In conclusion, this study presented a simple and novel framework for visualizing correlation structures
between overall consumption of foods group and their relation to nutrient intake and maternal characteristics. Our results
suggest that Western-type diet, high in meat and fats and low in fruits and vegetables, is associated with increased odds of
induced preterm birth.