Vegetarian diet and abdominal aortic aneurysm:
The consumption of nuts, vegetables, fruits and risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm was evaluated in a cohort study. Kent et al retrospectively analyzed medical and questionnaire data from 3.1 million patients screened with ultrasound for abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) from 2003 to 2008. The analysis affirmed well-known risk factors—male, age, family history, cardiovascular disease, and past smoker—but also discovered new markers of higher or lower risk. Excess weight was associated with increased risk, whereas exercise and consumption of nuts, vegetables, and fruits were associated with reduced risk. Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians had lower risk of AAA than whites and Native Americans. The study also found that the risk of AAA increased with more years of smoking and total cigarettes smoked (based on packs-per-day estimates), while the risk went down the longer the patient lived after quitting smoking. Based on their findings from the database, Kent et al created a new scoring system that would assign points to different risk factors, with negative points for factors that decrease AAA risk. For example, in their scoring system, smoking could add between 1 to 26 points to the patient’s risk score, depending on the duration and severity of their habit, and points are taken off for years since quitting. Being Hispanic or Asian subtracts four points, while being aged 80 to 84 adds 35 points. The authors suggest that patients with a score of 42 or above should be screened for AAA. This is also the point where the system has the best discriminative ability and would identify 88.6% of all AAAs, if applied to a population aged 50 to 84 years, or 59%, if applied to people 50 to 75 years old. (35)