Aim: To summarise the totality of evidence regarding dietary risk factors for hip fracture in adults, evaluating the quality of evidence, to provide recommendations for practice and further research.
Design: Systematic review of meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies.
Eligibility criteria: Systematic reviews with meta-analyses reporting summary risk estimates for associations between hip fracture incidence and dietary exposures including oral intake of a food, food group, beverage, or nutrient, or adherence to dietary patterns.
Information sources: Medline, Embase, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Library from inception until November 2020.
Data synthesis: The methodological quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses was assessed using AMSTAR-2, and the quality of evidence for each association was assessed using GRADE. Results were synthesised descriptively.
Results: Sixteen systematic reviews were identified, covering thirty-four exposures, including dietary patterns (n = 2 meta-analyses), foods, food groups, or beverages (n = 16), macronutrients (n = 3), and micronutrients (n = 13). Identified meta-analyses included 6,282 to 3,730,424 participants with between 322 and 26,168 hip fractures. The methodological quality (AMSTAR-2) of all systematic reviews was low or critically low. The quality of evidence (GRADE) was low for an inverse association between hip fracture incidence and intake of fruits and vegetables combined (adjusted summary relative risk for higher vs lower intakes: 0.92 [95% confidence interval: 0.87 to 0.98]), and very low for the remaining thirty-three exposures.
Conclusion: Dietary factors may play a role in the primary prevention of hip fracture, but the methodological quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses was below international standards, and there was a lack of high-quality evidence. More long-term cohort studies reporting absolute risks and robust, well-conducted meta-analyses with dose-response information are needed before policy guidelines can be formed.
Systematic review registration: PROSPERO CRD42020226190.