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* Division of Preventive Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA;
Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA; and ** Division of Aging, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA
2 To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: luwang{at}rics.bwh.harvard.edu.
Lycopene is a major carotenoid with potent antioxidant properties that may provide protection against the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM). In this study we examined the association between baseline dietary intakes of lycopene, lycopene-containing foods, and the subsequent development of type 2 DM in a large prospective cohort study. We analyzed a total of 35,783 women from the United States, aged
45 y and free from self-reported cardiovascular disease, cancer, and DM at baseline. Intakes of lycopene and total and individual tomato-based food products were assessed by a 131-itemvalidated semiquantitative food-frequency questionnaire. During a median follow-up of 10.2 y, 1544 cases of incident type 2 DM were documented. After adjusting for age, total energy intake, randomized treatment assignment, body mass index, and other known DM risk factors, the multivariate-adjusted relative risks and 95% CI of type 2 DM across increasing quintiles of dietary lycopene, were 1.00 (baseline), 1.10 (0.941.29), 1.10 (0.941.29), and 1.07 (0.911.26) (P linear trend = 0.56). Compared with women who consumed <1.5 servings/wk total tomato-based food products, women who consumed 1.5 to <4, 4 to <7, 7 to <10, and
10 servings/wk had multivariate relative risks (95% CI) of 1.03 (0.881.20), 1.02 (0.871.20), 1.09 (0.891.33), and 1.04 (0.801.36), respectively (P linear trend = 0.54). The associations for individual tomato-based food products were similar to the results for the combination of all tomato products. Our study found little evidence for an association between dietary intake of lycopene or lycopene-containing foods and the risk of type 2 DM.
KEY WORDS: lycopene tomato products intake diabetes mellitus epidemiology