The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) Diet Pattern and Incident Heart Failure

Background: The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet pattern has shown some promise for preventing heart failure (HF), but studies have been conflicting.

Objective: To determine whether the DASH diet pattern was associated with incident HF in a large biracial and geographically diverse population.

Methods and results: Among participants in the REasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) cohort study of adults aged ≥45 years who were free of suspected HF at baseline in 2003-2007, the DASH diet score was derived from the baseline food frequency questionnaire. The main outcome was incident HF defined as the first adjudicated HF hospitalization or HF death through December 31, 2016. We estimated hazard ratios for the associations of DASH diet score quartiles with incident HF, and incident HF with reduced ejection fraction and HF with preserved ejection fraction using the Lunn-McNeil extension to the Cox model. We tested for several prespecified interactions, including with age. Compared with the lowest quartile, individuals in the second to fourth DASH diet score quartiles had a lower risk for incident HF after adjustment for sociodemographic and health characteristics: quartile 2 hazard ratio, 0.69 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.56-0.85); quartile 3 hazard ratio, 0.71 (95% CI, 0.58-0.87); and quartile 4 hazard ratio, 0.73 (95% CI, 0.58-0.92). When stratifying results by age, quartiles 2-4 had a lower hazard for incident HF among those age <65 years, quartiles 3-4 had a lower hazard among those age 65-74, and the quartiles had similar hazard among those age ≥75 years (P_interaction = .003). We did not find a difference in the association of DASH diet with incident HF with reduced ejection fraction vs HF with preserved ejection fraction (P = .11).

Conclusions: DASH diet adherence was inversely associated with incident HF, specifically among individuals <75 years old.