Association between dietary intake of acrylamide and increased risk of mortality in women: Evidence from the E3N prospective cohort

Acrylamide is an organic compound classified as probably carcinogenic to humans because of sufficient evidence in animals but not in humans. Other health risks associated with acrylamide intake are still not fully elucidated. We aimed to study the relationship between acrylamide dietary intake and mortality in the E3N (Etude Epidémiologique auprès de femmes de l'Education Nationale) French cohort. We studied 72,585 women of the E3N prospective cohort, which completed a food frequency questionnaire in 1993. The E3N food consumption database and the food contamination database obtained from the second French total diet study were used to estimate participants' average daily acrylamide dietary intake. We estimated the associations between acrylamide dietary intake and all-cause or cause-specific mortality using Cox proportional hazard models. During follow-up (1993–2014), we identified 6441 deaths. The mean acrylamide dietary intake was 32.6 μg/day, with coffee consumption as principal contributor (48.6 %). In the fully adjusted model, we found a non-linear association between acrylamide dietary intake and all-cause mortality and a linear positive association with cardiovascular disease (HR per one STD increment [95%CI]: 1.11 [1.02; 1.21]), all-cancer (HR [95%CI]: 1.05 [1.01; 1.10]) and lung cancer (HR [95%CI]: 1.22 [1.09; 1.38]) mortality, while we observed no association with breast (HR [95%CI]: 0.94 [0.86; 1.03]) and colorectal (HR [95%CI]: 1.12 [0.97; 1.29]) cancer mortality. We highlighted an interaction between acrylamide dietary intake and smoking status in the models for all-cause and all-cancer mortality: when stratifying on smoking status, statistically significant positive associations were observed only in current smokers. This study on a large prospective cohort following more than 70,000 women for over 20 years suggests that higher acrylamide dietary intakes are associated with an increased risk of mortality. Therefore, it is essential to keep reducing acrylamide contamination and prevent dietary intake of acrylamide, especially among smokers.