While Indo-Mediterranean diets are anti-inflammatory and considered good for a healthy heart, recently, cohort studies and case-control studies have demonstrated that western-style diets rich in sugar and lack of physical activity are important behavioural risk factors of heart failure.
The study was published in The Open Inflammation Journal.
Pre-heart failure may be defined as a state of myocardial dysfunction, which is at high risk for developing complete heart failure.
It is similar to pre-diabetes or pre-hypertension for developing diabetes mellitus and hypertension, respectively.
Pre-heart failure is characterised with changes in cardiac muscles that are known as remodelling which may help to keep the blood pumping, but the ventricular walls may eventually weaken and are not able to pump adequate blood to the circulatory system resulting into chronic heart failure.
The criteria for the diagnosis of pre-heart failure and heart failure were an electrocardiographic and radiological increase in the size of the heart.
Effects of Indo-Mediterranean style foods on parameters of pre-heart failure and heart failure and arrhythmias were significantly lower in the intervention group compared to the control group.
At baseline, all the parameters of heart failure showed no significant differences, between the intervention and control group.
It is possible that treatment with Indo-Mediterranean style diets can cause a significant decline in pre-heart failure, heart failure as well as in arrhythmias, possibly due to the anti-inflammatory effects of such diets, which may be important mechanisms for the reduction in cardiovascular mortality in patients with recent myocardial infarction and high risk of cardiovascular diseases.