Pre-diagnosis Dietary Patterns of Multiple Myeloma | Richa Parikh, MD | ASH 2023

Hello everyone, I am Richa Paduk. I am currently a third year Hematology-Oncology Fellow at Carman-Oscan Institute in Detroit, Michigan. I would firstly like to thank Heltree for giving me an opportunity to present a recent study that I conducted with our fantastic team that includes my co-first author Francesca Castro and another co-author, Andri Durkac, at MSK and then my senior mentor Dr. Urvish Shah, who we know very well at MSK. So I'm going to be talking about our study titled Pre-Diagnosis, Dietary Patterns and Risk of Multiple Myeloma in the NIH AARP Diet and Health Study Cohort. So just to give a little bit of a background, the incidence of multiple myeloma is rising globally, as we know, and so focused research efforts to try and reduce the risk factors or intercept the incidence of myeloma is very important. Then Dr. Shah's team had recently conducted a survey in about 421 plasma cell disorder patients asking if they had any questions related to their diet after their diagnosis, and it turns out about 82% of the patients reported that they did have diet-related questions, and 52% of them actually reported that their questions were not adequately answered by their oncologist. So amongst the ones that received dietary guidance from their oncologist, 94% attempted to follow it, which shows that there is definitely keen interest in the patient population about wanting to know more about diet and risk of myeloma. So we conducted this study in the NIH AARP Diet and Health Study to look at pre-diagnosis dietary patterns and the risk of multiple myeloma. So back in 1995-96, the principal investigators of the NIH AARP Diet and Health Study Cohort went ahead and mailed a food frequency questionnaire to about 3.5 million participants, and they received about half a million completed questionnaires back, which formed the Diet and Health Study Cohort. So we asked for some variables from this study cohort and calculated dietary scores for four types of dietary patterns. The first one was HDI, or Healthy Eating Index, 2015. The next one was Healthy Diet Score, and or HDS, and then the third one was A-Med, which is the Alternate Meditarian Diet, and the fourth one was HPDI, which is Health, Cool, Plant-Based Dietary Index. So we calculated these dietary indices and grouped them into quartiles, into four quartiles, with the quartile cohort being the highest intake of these various individual dietary components, and we looked at the myeloma risk for these indices. And after exclusions, we had about 403,000 participants in this cohort, and these patients or participants were followed until like December 2011, which is a good follow-up time, and then we identified cases of myeloma by linking the data to the registry. So we had about 1,401 cases of multiple myeloma, which makes our study really the largest epidemiologic study conducted evaluating directly the risk of dietary factors and multiple myeloma. So our study findings suggest that there is an inverse association, which is statistically significant, with HPDI, or the Health, Cool, Plant-Based Dietary Index, and reduced multiple myeloma risk. The findings of our study actually validate what is already known about how plant-based diets are protective towards many different cancer risks, and particularly so in myeloma risk. We actually have submitted a revised version of this manuscript, and it should be out shortly in Leukemia Journal. And also, I would like to say that Dr. Shah is going to be presenting preliminary results from her pilot new intervention study today evening, and the results did show that plant-based diet was feasible, and it led to improved outcomes in pre-coastal state patients. So stay tuned in and make sure to follow the results of Dr. Shah's poster. Thank you so much.