Title
Associations between intake of dietary flavonoids and 10-year incidence of age-related hearing loss
Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
Nutrients
Volume
12
Issue
11
First Page
1
Last Page
8
Publisher
MDPI
School
School of Medical and Health Sciences
RAS ID
32364
Funders
Australian National Health and Medical Research Council
Abstract
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Dietary flavonoids are vasoactive phytochemicals with promising anti-inflammatory properties. We aimed to assess the associations between baseline intakes of six commonly consumed flavonoid subclasses and 10-year incidence of age-related hearing loss. At baseline, 1691 participants aged 50+ years had information on dietary intakes and hearing status. Hearing loss was defined as the pure-tone average of frequencies 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, and 4.0 kHz > 25 dB hearing level (HL). Dietary data were collected through a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire. The flavonoid content of foods was estimated using US databases. During the 10-year follow-up, 260 (31.6%) new cases of hearing loss (incident) were observed. After multivariable adjustment, participants in the fourth versus first quartile (reference group) of intake of dietary isoflavone had 36% lower risk of incident hearing loss after 10 years: odds ratios (OR) 0.64 (95% confidence intervals, CI, 0.42–0.99); p-value for trend = 0.03. Nonsignificant associations were observed between the other five flavonoid subclasses and 10-year incidence of hearing loss. Our findings do not support the hypothesis that the intake of dietary flavonoids protect against long-term risk of hearing loss. The association with isoflavone intake needs to be confirmed by other population-based studies.
DOI
10.3390/nu12113297
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
Gopinath, B., McMahon, C. M., Lewis, J. R., Bondonno, N. P., Bondonno, C. P., Burlutsky, G., … Mitchell, P. (2020). Associations between intake of dietary flavonoids and 10-year incidence of age-related hearing loss. Nutrients, 12(11), article 3297. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12113297