Objective

An analysis was conducted to explore the relationship between dietary fibre intake and stroke risk.

Methods

PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and WanFang and Weipu databases were systematically searched to obtain peer-reviewed literature on the relationship between dietary fibre and stroke risk. The search time was as of 1 April 2023. Newcastle–Ottawa Scale (NOS) was used to evaluate the quality of the included studies. The pooled hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were calculated using Stata 16.0. The Q test and I² statistics were used to evaluate the heterogeneity and sensitivity analysis to explore potential bias. Meta-regression analysis was conducted to explore the relationship between total dietary intake quality and stroke risk.

Results

Sixteen high-quality studies, involving 855,671 subjects, met the inclusion criteria and were involved in the final meta-analysis. The results showed that higher total dietary fibre (HR: 0.81; 95% CI: 0.75–0.88), fruit fibre (HR: 0.88; 95% CI: 0.82–0.93), vegetable fibre (HR: 0.85; 95% CI: 0.81–0.89), soluble fibre (HR: 0.82; 95% CI: 0.72–0.93) and insoluble fibre (HR: 0.77; 95% CI: 0.66–0.89) had a positive effect on reducing the risk of stroke. However, cereal fibre (HR: 0.90; 95% CI: 0.81–1.00) was not statistically significant in reducing the risk of stroke. For different stroke types, higher total dietary fibre was associated with ischemic stroke (HR: 0.83; 95% CI: 0.79–0.88) and had a similar positive effect but was not found in haemorrhagic stroke (HR: 0.91; 95% CI: 0.80–1.03). Stroke risk decreased with increased total dietary fibre intake (β=–0.006189, P=0.001). No potential bias from the individual study was found from sensitivity analysis.

Conclusion

Increasing dietary fibre intake had a positive effect on reducing the risk of stroke. Different dietary fibres have various effects on stroke.