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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 May 21.
Published in final edited form as: Circulation. 2019 May 21;139(21):2422–2436. doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.118.038908

Figure 5. Associations of arachidonic acid (AA; 20:4n6) with total CHD (A) and ischemic stroke (B) in pooled analysis of 30 prospective studies.

Figure 5.

Study-specific estimates for hazard ratio (HR) per interquintile range (i.e., range between the midpoint of the bottom quintile [10th percentile] and the top quintile [90th percentile]) of biomarker linoleic acid were pooled based on the following order: 1) adipose tissue, 2) erythrocyte phospholipid, 3) plasma phospholipid 4) cholesterol ester, and 5) total plasma. Study weights are indicated (grey squares) by individual biomarker compartment and overall. Study-specific analyses were conducted using models that included the following covariates: age (linear), sex (male/female), race (binary: Caucasian/non-Caucasian, or study-specific), field or clinical center if applicable (study-specific categories), body-mass index (BMI, linear), education (less than high school graduate, high school graduate, some college or vocational school, college graduate), smoking (current, former, or never; if former not assessed, then current or not current), physical activity (quintiles of metabolic equivalents (METs) per week; or if METs unavailable, quintiles of study-specific definitions of physical or leisure activity), alcohol intake (none, 1–6 drinks/week, 1–2 drink/day, >2 drink/day [14 g alcohol=1 standard drink]), diabetes mellitus (yes or no; defined as treatment with oral hypoglycemic agents, insulin, or fasting plasma glucose >126 mg/dL), treated hypertension (yes or no; defined as hypertension drug use; or if unavailable, as diagnosed/history of hypertension according to study-specific definitions), treated hypercholesterolemia (yes or no; defined as lipid-lowering drug use; if unavailable, as diagnosed/history of hypercholesterolemia according to study-specific definitions), regular aspirin use (yes or no), biomarker concentrations of α-linolenic acid (ALA; 18:3n-3), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA; 20:5n-3), sum of trans-18:1 fatty acids, and sum of trans-18:2 fatty acids (all linear; expressed as % total fatty acids). If data did not allow such categorization, study-specific categories were used. See Table 1 footnote for abbreviations of cohorts.