Associations of egg consumption with cardiovascular disease in a cohort study of 0.5 million Chinese adults

"Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the leading cause of death and disability worldwide, including China, mostly due to ischaemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke (including both haemorrhagic and ischaemic stroke).1 Unlike IHD, which is the number 1 cause of premature death in most Western countries, stroke is the most responsible cause in China, followed by IHD. Although ischaemic stroke accounted for the majority of incident strokes, the proportion of incident haemorrhagic stroke in China was still higher than that in high-income countries (23.8% vs 9–13%)."

"Associations of egg consumption with cardiovascular disease in a cohort study of 0.5 million Chinese adults" source

"Modifiable factors, such as smoking, alcohol, physical inactivity and dietary factors, play crucial roles in the development of CVD, as do non-modifiable factors such as age and sex. Eggs are a prominent source of dietary cholesterol, but they also contain high-quality protein, many vitamins and bioactive components such as phospholipids and carotenoids. Previous studies have been inconsistent, and most of them observed insignificant associations between egg consumption and coronary heart disease (CHD) or stroke. However, the Life Span Study in Japan found that daily egg consumption was associated with a 30% lower risk of total stroke mortality compared with very occasional (rare) consumption. These studies had relatively smaller sample sizes or fewer cases, were too low-powered to obtain precise effect estimates, and were unable to examine the associations with stroke subtypes, especially haemorrhagic stroke. Above all, they originated from Western and Japanese populations, which have dietary habits and other lifestyle and CVD patterns that differ from the Chinese population. Dietary guidelines from the Chinese Nutrition Society recommend healthy adults consume 40–50 g of egg (about 0.8–1 egg) per day, with particular emphasis on the egg yolk, and recently cancelled the upper limit of cholesterol. Yet the amount of egg consumption has not improved over the past decade. Evidence about the relation between eggs and  cardiovascular health among Chinese adults is therefore urgently required


Our study aimed to examine the associations of egg consumption with CVD, including IHD, major coronary events (MCE), haemorrhagic stroke and ischaemic stroke in the China Kadoorie Biobank (CKB) study, an ongoing prospective cohort of about 0.5 million adults." source, read more