Dietary carbohydrate intake and the risk of esophageal cancer: A meta-analysis.

Previous studies had been published to explore the association about carbohydrate intake on esophageal cancer risk, with inconsistent results. This meta-analysis aimed to assess the association between dietary carbohydrate intake and the risk of esophageal cancer.Suitable studies were carefully searched with the databases of PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and Wanfang Database. A random-effects model was used for combined odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI). Stata software 14.0 was adopted for the analysis.At the end, 13 publications were included in our study. Pooled results suggested that highest category vs. lowest category of carbohydrate intake could reduce the risk of esophageal cancer (summarized OR= 0.627, 95% CI= 0.505-0.778, I2= 59.9%, P for heterogeneity= 0.001). The results for carbohydrate intake on the risk of esophageal adenocarcinoma (summarized OR= 0.569, 95% CI= 0.417-0.777) and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (summarized OR= 0.665, 95% CI= 0.453-0.975) were consistent with the overall result. A positive association was found in European, Asian, North American populations, instead of South American populations.In conclusions, dietary carbohydrate intake may have a protective effect against the risk of esophageal cancer.