Association of dietary live microbe intake with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in an older population: Evidence from NHANES 2003-2018

Background

The relationship between dietary live microbe intake, non-dietary prebiotics/probiotics, and mortality in older adults remains unclear.

Methods

Participants from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2003–2018 were included. Participants were categorized into three groups based on estimated live microbe intake: low, medium, and high. Additionally, they were divided by their consumption of foods with medium or high microbial content. Text mining was employed to identify the use of non-dietary prebiotics and probiotics by analyzing the names and ingredients of dietary supplements and drugs. Associations between live microbe intake, non-dietary prebiotics/probiotics, and all-cause or cardiovascular mortality were assessed using Kaplan-Meier survival curves and Cox regression models. Inverse Probability of Treatment Weighting was used for sensitivity analysis

Result

A total of 7882 participants were included in the study. During a mean follow-up of 8.08 years, all-cause mortality was 18 % lower in older adults with high dietary live microbe intake in fully adjusted models (HR, 0.82; 95 %CI 0.70–0.96), and cardiovascular mortality was reduced by 23 % (HR, 0.77; 95 %CI 0.61–0.98). The risk of all-cause mortality was reduced by 21 % in the G3 group compared with the G1 group (HR, 0.79; 95 % CI 0.69–0.89) and a 29 % reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease-specific death (HR, 0.71;95 %CI 0.59–0.86). In addition, we also observed that nondietary prebiotic and probiotic supplement intake was also associated with a reduced risk of mortality in an older US population.

Conclusion

In older U.S. adults, higher dietary live microorganisms and non-dietary probiotics/prebiotics intake was associated with a reduced risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality.