Diet and risk of ischemic heart disease in India

Department of Community Medicine
PSG Institute of Medical Sciences and Research
Peelamedu, Coimbatore 641004
India
E-mail: drslravishankar{at}yahoo.co.in

Dear Sir:

We would like to point out some problems with the interesting article by Rastogi et al (1) that was recently published in the Journal. In this study, only 12% of the subjects were women; the remaining 88% were men. Generally speaking, in India, men are not involved in cooking. Hence, the men in this study may not have been able to correctly specify the amount of cooking oil that would be used.

In Table 4, there are some factors that were not significant in the univariate analysis but that were significant in the multivariate analysis because of an interaction among the variables. A better way of presenting these data would have been to present data for only those variables that were significant in the univariate analysis and then subjected to multivariate analysis to determine the variation in relative risk. Another problem with the study was that type of personality and stress were not taken into consideration, which may have confounded the results.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

None of the authors had a conflict of interest.

REFERENCE

1. Rastogi T, Reddy KS, Vaz M, et al. Diet and risk of ischemic heart disease in India. Am J Clin Nutr 2004;79:582–92.