Eating patterns that align with the Mediterranean diet or the dietary approaches to stop hypertension (DASH) diet could help lower cardiovascular disease risk in adults with type 1 diabetes, according to results from a six-year study.
“Type 1 diabetes increases the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, which raises the likelihood of heart attacks, strokes and other serious health complications,” said Arpita Basu, PhD, RD, associate professor in the department of kinesiology and nutrition sciences at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. “We wanted to find out how people’s regular eating habits affected blood inflammatory markers that predict cardiovascular disease risk in adults with type 1 diabetes.”
Overall, those who consumed diets more closely conforming to DASH and Mediterranean patterns — and thus receiving higher scores on those indices — had lower levels of Hcy and PAI-1 after accounting for other demographic and lifestyle factors such as body mass index, age, total caloric intake, blood lipids, blood pressure, smoking and physical activity. No associations were observed between AHEI scores and any of the biomarkers studied.