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. 2024 Jun 24:11:1363299.
doi: 10.3389/fnut.2024.1363299. eCollection 2024.

Associations of dietary selenium intake with the risk of chronic diseases and mortality in US adults

Yuchen Zhang #  1 , Shixin Meng #  2 , Yuexin Yu  3   4 , Liangwen Bi  1 , Jihong Tian  1 , Lizhen Zhang  1
Affiliations

Associations of dietary selenium intake with the risk of chronic diseases and mortality in US adults

Yuchen Zhang et al. Front Nutr. .

Abstract

Objective: Selenium is an essential micronutrient and a type of dietary antioxidant. This study aimed to investigate the associations of dietary selenium intake with the risk of human chronic disease [cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes mellitus (DM), and cancer] and mortality among US general adults.

Methods: The dietary and demographic data in this study were collected from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2007 to 2018. Death outcomes were determined by associating with the National Death Index (NDI) records as of December 31, 2019. Logistic regression analyses were used to investigate the relationship of selenium intake with the risk of CVD, DM, and cancer. The effect of dietary selenium on all-cause and disease-specific mortality was estimated with restricted cubic spline (RCS) curves based on the univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazard models.

Results: Among the 25,801 participants, dietary selenium intake was divided into quintiles (Q1-Q5). After covariate adjustment, the results showed that the participants with higher quintiles (Q4 and Q5) of selenium intake tended to have a low risk of CVD (OR = 0.97, 95% CI: 0.96, 0.99; OR = 0.98, 95% CI: 0.97, 1.00, respectively). Moreover, the RCS curves showed a significant nonlinear association between selenium intake and the risk of all-cause (with a HR of 0.82, 95% CI: 0.68, 0.99) and DM-specific mortality (with the lowest HR of 0.30; 95% CI, 0.12-0.75). Furthermore, we conducted a subgroup analysis and found a negative correlation between the highest quartile of selenium intake and all-cause mortality among participants aged 50 and above (HR = 0.75, 95% CI: 0.60-0.93, p = 0.009).

Conclusion: Our results indicated that a moderate dietary selenium supplement decreased the risk of CVD and displayed a nonlinear trend in association with the risk of all-cause and DM-specific mortality among US adults. In addition, we found that participants aged 50 and older may benefit from higher selenium intake. However, these findings still need to be confirmed through further mechanism exploration.

Keywords: NHANES; cardiovascular disease; diabetes mellitus; mortality; selenium intake.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flow chart of the sample selection in this study.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The RCS analysis between selenium intake and all-cause, CVD-specific, DM-specific and cancer-specific mortality. The red line represents hazard ratio, and blue area represent the 95% confidence interval of estimated HR. (A) All-cause mortality; (B) CVD-specific mortality; (C) DM-specific mortality; (D) cancer-specific mortality.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Forest plot of the associations between selenium intake and the risk of all-cause mortality as age-stratified (A) and gender-stratified (B). The value of ORs was calculated using multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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