Shared and ethnic background site-specific dietary patterns in the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL)

Dietary patterns (DPs) synthesize multiple related dietary components in one or more combined variables. A drawback of DPs is their limited reproducibility across subpopulations, especially adoptinga posterioriDPs, derived using standard multivariate methods [e.g., factor analysis (FA)]. Standard approaches assessing reproducibility of FA-based DPs mostly rely on correlation coefficients/agreement measures between pairs of factors and do not consider any statistical model. Multi-study factor analysis builds upon standard FA model to identify DPs shared across all subpopulations and those specific to some subpopulations. Pattern reproducibility is investigated from a different perspective: a shared DP identified within multi-study factor analysis is “reproducible” since it is common to all subpopulations. Bayesian multi-study factor analysis (BMSFA) has been developed to improve DP retention and identification, two critical issues as the number of subpopulations analyzed increases.Using baseline (2008-2011) 24-hour dietary recalls from the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (n=16,415), we applied the BMSFA on 42 common nutrients to identify shared and subpopulation-specific DPs where subpopulations were defined as the cross-classification of ethnic background and study site (EBS).Overall, 4 shared DPs were identified:Plant-based foods, Processed foods, Dairy products, andSeafood. At the subpopulation level, we identified 12 EBS-specific DPs, one for each EBS category, primarily representing variants of foods from animal sources. Different nuances were expressed by subsets of fairly similar EBS-specific DPs, including anAnimal vs. vegetable source, anAnimal source only, and aPoultry vs. dairy productsoverarching DPs. Shared DPs from BMSFA were similar to their counterparts from standard FA and frequentist multi-study factor analysis; EBS-specific DPs from BMSFA were better characterized than those from frequentist multi-study factor analysis.In conclusion, the BMSFA successfully captured sources of both dietary homogeneity and heterogeneity in a large well-characterized study of US Hispanics/Latino adults by ethnic background and site.