Healthnotes Newswire (April 24, 2008)—The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet is known to help reduce high blood pressure—now a new study has found that women who follow this diet also have a lower risk of heart attack and stroke.

In the study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, more than 88,000 female nurses were monitored through diet and health questionnaires for 24 years. The women, who did not have heart disease or diabetes at the beginning of the study, were given scores based on how closely their diets matched the DASH recommendations.

Close adherence to the DASH diet, reflected by a high score, was associated with lower risks of both heart attack and stroke. The women with the highest scores were 24% less likely to have had a heart attack and 18% less likely to have had a stoke than women with the lowest scores.

Although the DASH score was not associated with lower cholesterol levels, it was associated with lower levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of inflammation that has been closely linked to cardiac risk.

The DASH diet was developed by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in an effort to help people reduce blood pressure without medication. It recommends a specified number of servings from eight food groups that should be eaten each day.

This study developed a DASH score that was based on the diet’s eight areas of emphasis:

• high intake of fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes, low-fat dairy products, and whole grains, and

• low intake of sodium, sweetened beverages, and red and processed meats.

The emphasized foods are rich in fiber, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and antioxidants.

“The findings from our study suggest that an overall dietary pattern that resembles the DASH diet can prevent heart attack and stroke in women,” commented study author Dr. Teresa Fung from the Department of Nutrition at Simmons College.

The NIH publishes the DASH diet on its website: www.nih.gov/news/pr/apr97/Dash.htm.

(Arch Intern Med 2008;168:713–20)