Dietary Patterns and Hypertension: Insights from a CHNS Cohort

A China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) cohort analysis links long-term dietary trajectories with differing risks of incident hypertension among Chinese adults.

In a longitudinal cohort of 1,049 Chinese adults with repeated dietary measures and 11,725.5 person‑years of follow-up, investigators used factor analysis and group‑based trajectory modeling to derive dietary trajectories and assessed incident hypertension as the outcome. Long-term adherence to high‑stable southern and healthy patterns was associated with lower risk of incident hypertension after multivariable adjustment. These associations remained robust in sensitivity analyses excluding baseline cardiometabolic disease and after multiple imputation for missing covariates.

By contrast, the alcohol-meat pattern carried the largest relative elevation in risk. The medium‑high‑medium alcohol‑meat trajectory had an adjusted hazard ratio of about 1.48 versus the low‑stable group. The association persisted in sensitivity analyses and mirrored a higher prevalence of male sex, smoking, and heavy alcohol use within that trajectory subgroup, indicating that sustained alcohol‑and‑meat–heavy exposure confers a materially higher hypertension incidence.