Meat consumption linked to increased risk of ischemic heart disease

An elevated risk of ischemic heart disease (IHD) is linked to certain metabolomic signatures that reflect ingestion of both unprocessed red meat and processed meat, says a recent study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Concerning the link between eating meat and the risk of ischemic heart disease, the research is conflicting. It is unclear to what degree the heterogeneity in metabolic reactions across people to the same diet may account for this connection. To determine if metabolomic patterns associated with the ingestion of unprocessed red meat and processed beef are linked to an increased risk of IHD, Xue Dong and colleagues undertook this investigation.

The UK Biobank was used to create a cohort study with 92 246 participants (mean age, 56.1 years; 55.1% women). Over the course of the 8.74-year median follow-up, 3059 incident IHD episodes were recorded. A touchscreen dietary questionnaire was used to measure the intake of processed and unprocessed red meat. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy with high throughput was used to characterize the plasma metabolome. The relationship between meat intake and IHD was examined using the Cox proportional hazards regression model. For metabolomic signatures and the causal connection of signatures with IHD, genome-wide association analysis and one-sample Mendelian randomization were used.

The key findings of this study were:

1. Researchers created metabolomic signatures of 157 and 142 metabolites for unprocessed red meat and processed meat, respectively, using elastic net regularized regressions (r=0.223 and r=0.329).

2. These markers demonstrated beneficial relationships with incident IHD.

3. For red and processed meat related signals, genome-wide association analyses found 45 and 4 loci, respectively, implicated in lipid and lipoprotein metabolism.

4. It was demonstrated by Mendelian randomization that there were haphazard correlations between signatures and risk of incident IHD.

Metabolomic signatures that assess the metabolic response to diets of both unprocessed red meat and processed beef were used in the large prospective cohort research. The genetic and observational data suggest that these markers are linked to a higher risk of IHD. Additional studies on the biological pathways and metabolomic fingerprints of the constituent metabolites may shed new light on the biological processes by which eating meat affects heart disease.

Reference:

Dong, X., Zhuang, Z., Zhao, Y., Song, Z., Xiao, W., Wang, W., Li, Y., Huang, N., Jia, J., Liu, Z., Qi, L., & Huang, T. (2023). Unprocessed Red Meat and Processed Meat Consumption, Plasma Metabolome, and Risk of Ischemic Heart Disease: A Prospective Cohort Study of UK Biobank. In Journal of the American Heart Association (Vol. 12, Issue 7). Ovid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health). https://doi.org/10.1161/jaha.122.027934