Association of Symptoms with Eating Habits and Food Preferences in Chronic Gastritis Patients: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Purpose: There is a lack of research on the relationship between symptoms and dietary factors of chronic gastritis (CG) patients, and the contribution of dietary management in relieving symptoms of CG patients has not attracted enough attention. This study aimed to identify the associations between different symptoms and dietary factors. Patients and Methods. All CG patients in this cross-sectional study were recruited from 3 hospitals in Beijing, China, from October 2015 to January 2016. Association Rule Mining analysis was performed to identify the correlations between gastrointestinal symptoms and dietary factors (including eating habits and food preferences), and subgroup analysis focused on gender differences.

Results: The majority of patients (58.17%) reported that their symptoms were related to dietary factors. About 53% reported that they had the habit of "eating too fast," followed by "irregular mealtimes" (29.66%) and "eating leftover food" (28.14%). Sweets (27.57%), spicy foods (25.10%), and meat (24.33%) were the most popular among all participants. Stomachache and gastric distention were the most common symptoms and were both associated with irregular mealtimes, irregular meal sizes, eating out in restaurants, meats, barbecue, fried foods, sour foods, sweets, snacks, and salty foods (support >0.05 and lift >1.0). Their most strongly associated factors were irregular meal sizes, barbecues, and snacks (lift >1.2). In addition, irregular mealtimes, salty foods, and sweet foods may be important diet factors influencing the symptoms in CG patients (support >0.05 and lift >1.0), as they were associated with almost all dyspeptic symptoms in the whole group and subgroup analyses. Furthermore, alcohol, barbecue, and spicy foods were associated with almost all symptoms for males (support >0.05 and lift >1.0), but sweets were the only dietary factor associated with all symptoms for females (support >0.05 and lift >1.0).

Conclusion: This study has provided new data for the association of symptoms with eating habits and food preferences in CG patients. The role of individual daily management schemes, such as dietary or lifestyle programs, needs more attention.

Figure 1

Symptoms ranking of the study population.

Figure 2

ARM analysis of symptoms and dietary factors. The arrows indicate the relationship between rules, and directions of the arrows indicate antecedent and consequent items. The size of the circle represents the level of “support” associated with the rule (the larger the circle, the larger the support value), and the color represents the level of “lift” with the rule (the darker the color, the larger the lift value).

Figure 3

The relationship between symptoms with dietary factors stratified by gender. The size of the orange circle represents the number of related symptoms (the larger the circle, the larger the number). The size of the green line represents the level of “support” associated with the rule (the thicker the line, the larger the support value), and the color represents the level of “lift” with the rule (the darker the color, the larger the lift value).