Special Issue

Effects of Nutrient Intake on Cardiovascular Disease and Life Expectancy

Submission Deadline: May 15, 2026 (Open) Submit Now

Guest Editor

Paolo Emilio Puddu, MD, PhD

Full Professor of Cardiology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

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Research Interests: Clinical cardiology; imaging technologies; cardiovascular epidemiology and biostatistics; in vitro electrophysiology; pharmacology

About This Topic

Dietary scores or similar tools define diets from the available data and one approach is to look at the impact on cardiovascular disease (CVD) and whether any association exists with good or bad outcomes of any kind of events in the study population. The definition of a dietary score can be made a-priori, that is defining its composition using the available food groups and/or nutrients, on the basis of the opinions of the investigators, or a-posteriori, assigning this task to computer procedures and models that take this decision of the basis of statistical interplays and procedures, largely independent fr'm the investigators’ opinions.

When given so selected diets (using these two a-priori or, more rarely, a-posteriori procedures) show a statistically significant association with the cohort events, the conclusion is taken that the occurrence of events is related to different individual probabilities, either to food groups or nutrients. A number of diets or dietary scores were presented to date in this way: the Mediterranean Diet, the WHO diet proposal, the Mediterranean diet pyramid, the Healthy Eating Index, the DASH dietary rules against hypertension, some major Greek scores, the Mediterranean Adequacy Index, two reports from the EPIC project, the NIH-AARP Diet, an Italian a-posteriori index, the Alternative Healthy Eating Index. However, many more exist if a recent review of a-priori Mediterranean scores quotes 30 of them.

The purpose of this special issue is to concentrate on diets and scores both a-priori and a-posteriori, by original or review articles, to examine how food groups, individual nutrients or inflammatory food-related scores impact CVD incidence, mortality and life expectancy. We also aim at disentangling the major CVD components into coronary heart disease, heart failure, stroke and peripheral arterial diseases, all sharing a common atherosclerotic etiology, to see whether diets may improve prevention and long-term prolongation of life expectancy.

Keywords

Diet; nutrients; inflammation; scores; CVD; CHD; HF; stroke; PAD; prediction; prevention

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted through the LIDSEN Submission System. Detailed information on manuscript preparation and submission is available in the Instructions for Authors. All submitted articles will be thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process and will be processed following the Editorial Process and Quality Control policy. Upon acceptance, the article will be immediately published in a regular issue of the journal and will be listed together on the special issue website, with a label that the article belongs to the Special Issue. LIDSEN distributes articles under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) License in an open-access model. The authors own the copyright to the article, and the article can be free to access, distribute, and reuse provided that the original work is correctly cited.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). Research articles and review articles are highly invited. Authors are encouraged to send the tentative title and abstract of the planned paper to the Editorial Office (rpn@lidsen.com) for record. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office.

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