Background: Gastric cancer remains the second cause of cancer-related death worldwide. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of shorter dinner-to-bed time, post-dinner walk, and obesity on gastric cardia adenocarcinoma (GCA) risk.
Methods: The study subjects consisted of 146 GCA patients and 166 healthy controls roughly matched by gender and age. Conditional logistic regression was used to calculated odds ratio (OR) and 95 % confidence intervals (CIs).
Results: The adjusted ORs of GCA for subjects with shorter dinner-to-bed time were 4.18 (95 % CI 2.10-8.33) compared with those with longer dinner-to-bed time. What is more, when reflux symptom was added into the multivariate models, risk estimate for shorter dinner-to-bed time decreased greatly, but still remained statistically significant (p = 0.007). Post-dinner walk was associated with a significantly decreased GCA risk (adjusted OR 0.54; 95 % CI 0.31-0.94). When subjects were analyzed according to post-dinner walk, the adjusted OR of GCA for shorter dinner-to-bed time relative to longer dinner-to-bed time was much higher for non-walking subjects (adjusted OR 20.21) than walking subjects (adjusted OR 1.39). We further found a significant interaction between shorter dinner-to-bed time and post-dinner walk regarding the risk of GCA (adjusted OR 0.07; p = 0.001).
Conclusions: We found that shorter dinner-to-bed time was associated with significantly increased GCA risk, partly depending on reflux symptoms, while post-dinner walk was related to a significantly decreased GCA risk and could greatly attenuate the GCA risk attributable to shorter dinner-to-bed time.