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. 2025 Aug 31;64(6):269.
doi: 10.1007/s00394-025-03768-w.

Dietary vitamin D and gastric cancer risk within the stomach cancer pooling (stop) project

Claudia Santucci  1 , Arianna Natale  1 , Claudio Pelucchi  1 , Rossella Bonzi  1 , Nuno Lunet  2   3   4 , Samantha Morais  2   3 , Jesús Vioque  5   6 , Sandra González-Palacios  5   6 , Nuria Aragonés  5   7 , Gemma Castaño-Vinyals  5   8   9   10 , Reza Malekzadeh  11 , Mohammadreza Pakseresht  11   12   13 , Eva Negri  14 , Paolo Boffetta  14   15 , M Constanza Camargo  16 , Maria Paula Curado  17 , Zuo-Feng Zhang  18 , Stefania Boccia  19   20 , Carlo La Vecchia  21 , Marta Rossi  1
Affiliations

Dietary vitamin D and gastric cancer risk within the stomach cancer pooling (stop) project

Claudia Santucci et al. Eur J Nutr. .

Abstract

Purpose: The evidence regarding the role of vitamin D on gastric cancer (GC) is controversial. Within the Stomach cancer Pooling (StoP) Project, a global consortium of epidemiological studies on GC, we aimed to evaluate the relationship between dietary vitamin D and GC risk.

Methods: Five case-control studies were included in the analysis, accounting for 1875 cases and 5899 controls. Odds ratios (OR) of GC and the corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CI) for tertiles of vitamin D intake were computed using logistic regression models adjusted for relevant confounders, including energy intake. The pooled ORs were computed using random-effect models.

Results: The pooled OR of GC for the highest compared to the lowest tertile of vitamin D intake was 1.06 (95% CI 0.80-1.39), with a p for heterogeneity of 0.019. No significant association was found across strata of sex, age, socioeconomic status, smoking status, alcohol intake, and vegetable and fruit consumption.

Conclusions: Our pooled analysis indicates that there is no association between dietary vitamin D and the risk of GC.

Keywords: Dietary vitamin D; Epidemiology; Gastric cancer; Pooled analysis.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Conflict of interest: The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. Ethical approval: All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1964 and later versions.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Forest plot for study-specific and pooled odds ratios (OR)a with corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CI) of gastric cancer for the highest versus the lowest tertile of vitamin D intake. aEstimated by two-stage meta-analysis using logistic regression models adjusted for sex, age, socioeconomic status, smoking status, family history of gastric cancer, Helicobacter pylori infection (when available), and total energy intake.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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