These findings emphasize the role of demographics and lifestyle factors in determining differences in dietary GI and GL of the Greek population. The Mediterranean diet appeared to mitigate the dietary GI and GL mainly in males, suggesting effects that merit further investigation.
Excess total mortality persisted during the circulation of different lineages and sub-lineages of the Omicron variant in Italy. This excess was not limited to the elderly population but involved also working age individuals, though the absolute number of deaths was small. The substantial excess found in July 2022 is, however, largely attributable to high temperatures. At the end of the year, this may translate into 30 to 35,000 excess deaths, i.e. over 5% excess mortality. This reversed the long-term trend toward increasing life expectancy, with the relative implications in social security and retirement schemes.
Limited knowledge is available on dietary patterns and bladder cancer risk. We analyzed data from an Italian case-control study carried out between 2003 and 2014, including 690 incident bladder cancer cases and 665 hospital-controls. We derived nutrient-based dietary patterns applying principal component factor analysis on 28 selected nutrients. We categorized factor scores according to quartiles, and estimated the odds ratios (ORs) and the corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) through logistic regression models, adjusted for major confounding factors. We identified four dietary patterns named "Animal products", "Vitamins and fiber", "Starch-rich", and "Animal unsaturated fatty acids". We found an inverse association between the "Vitamins and fiber" pattern and bladder cancer (OR = 0.70, 95% CI: 0.48-0.99, IV versus I quartile category). Inverse relationships of borderline significance were also found for the "Animal products" and the "Animal unsaturated fatty acids" dietary patterns. No significant association was evident for the "Starch-rich" pattern. The current study allowed us to identify major dietary patterns in this Italian population. Our study confirms available evidence and shows that scoring high on a fruit-and-vegetables pattern provides beneficial effects on bladder cancer risk.
The relation between reproductive and menstrual factors and the risk of colorectal cancer was investigated in a case-control study conducted in Northern Italy on 279 women with colon cancer, 153 with rectal cancer and 386 controls admitted to hospital for a wide spectrum of acute, nonneoplastic, nondigestive disorders. Compared with nulliparous women, the relative risks (RR) of colon cancer were 1.1 for one and two births, 1.3 for three or four, and 1.1 for five or more. Corresponding values for rectal cancer were 0.9 for one, 1.1 for two, 1.4 for three or four, and 0.8 for five or more births. No significant association emerged with number of abortions, and no consistent pattern of trends for both colon and rectum cancer was observed in relation to age at first or last birth. Women whose menarche occurred at age 15 or over were at significantly lower risk of colon cancer (RR 0.5, 95% confidence interval = 0.3-0.9), and the point estimate was below unity, though nonsignificantly, for rectal cancer too (RR = 0.7). There was no relation between age at menopause, duration of menstrual cycles, and cancers of the colon and rectum. The present study produced no evidence that reproductive factors are related to colorectal cancer in this population. With this sample size, it was possible to exclude relative risks below 0.8 for colon and 0.7 for rectal cancer among multiparous women versus nulliparous ones. These findings are thus inconsistent with the epidemiological evidence on reproductive and menstrual factors and breast cancer in this and other populations, with the sole potential exception of the reduced risk of colorectal cancer among women whose menarche occurred at age 15 or over.
This paper reports on recent advances on the relation between diet, other environmental factors and breast and gynaecological cancers. Despite considerable research the issue remains still unsettled. The protective effect of a diet rich in vegetables and fruit, and thus selected (antioxidant) micronutrients, is not consistently reported in various studies. The possible relationship between fats and breast and female genital tract neoplasms also remains unconfirmed, while the potential benefits of physical activity remains unquantified. Alcohol appears to be related to the risk of breast cancer and overweight is associated with post-menopausal breast cancer and is strongly related to the risk of endometrial cancer.
