Hi, this is Urvi Shah. I'm a hematologist and oncologist on the myeloma service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. I wanted to share a few updates from our research. Richa Parekh, a fellow in hematology and oncology, and Francesca Castro, a dietitian, have worked We've looked at the National Institute of Health AARP data set. So far, in terms of myeloma research and dietary risk factors, there are only two other epidemiologic studies looking at dietary patterns and the risk of myeloma development. Those two studies had 65 cases of myeloma and 423 cases of myeloma each. Our study so far is the largest to date, with over 1300 cases of myeloma. We looked at dietary patterns, four different dietary scores that we created. One of them was the healthy dietary score, the alternate Mediterranean dietary pattern, the healthy plant-based dietary index. What we did is look between quartiles of these dietary patterns, those with the highest scores versus those with the lowest scores. What's the risk of developing myeloma? This is a study with over 300,000 participants, out of which 1300 eventually developed myeloma. So we were able to look at the whole cohort and see whether the myeloma patients had a higher risk because of certain dietary factors. What we saw was the healthy plant-based dietary index, the highest quartile, had a 15% reduced risk of developing myeloma compared to the lowest quartile, so the lowest scoring. The healthy plant-based diet index is a scoring system which gives higher scores for more fiber-rich plant-based foods and lower scores for eating less of those foods. That study suggests again that maybe diet and certain factors could affect the risk of myeloma development.
HealthTree • October 3, 2023