ROCKVILLE, Md.—Higher food and total folate intake reduced the likelihood of pancreatic cancer in women in a recent National Institutes of Health (NIH) study (Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Feb;91(2):449-55). However, the same association was not found in men.
Researchers at the National Cancer Institute investigated the association between dietary folate intake and pancreatic cancer in the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial (PLCO) cohort. They collected dietary data from self-administered food-frequency questionnaires from 1998 to 2005. Among the 51,988 male and 57,187 female participants, aged 55 to 74 years at enrollment, with complete dietary and multivitamin information, 162 men and 104 women developed pancreatic cancer during follow-up (January 1998 to December 2006; median: 6.5 y).
Women who received 253.3 µg/d of folate from food had a significantly decreased pancreatic cancer risk compared to women who ate 179.1 µg/d (P=0.09). However, higher food folate intake was not associated with a lower pancreatic cancer risk in men. Researchers also a significant inverse trend in risk of pancreatic cancer across increasing quartiles of total folate in women (P=0.04), but not in men (P=65).
This study counters research from the Netherlands Cohort Study published in June 2009 that did not find a protective association of total dietary folate or individual folate vitamers on the risk of pancreatic cancer (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2009;18(6):1785–91). In this study, men and women (120,852), ages 55 to 69 years, provided information on diet at baseline via food frequency questionnaires, and the cohort was followed for 13.3 years. A total of 364 cases were identified by record linkage with regional cancer registries and the Dutch National Database of Pathology Reports. After adjusting for age, gender, smoking status, number of years smoked, number of cigarettes smoked per day and intake of added sugar multivariate hazard ratio comparing the highest and lowest quintiles of folate intake for pancreatic cancer risk was 1.37. When folate vitamers were analyzed separately, results did not show a difference in association.