Dietary patterns and its relationship with video display terminal syndrome among undergraduate students in Xi'an

Objective To investigate the relationship between different dietary patterns among undergraduate students in Xi'an and video display terminal (VDT) syndrome and to provide effective nutritional precaution and scientific guidelines.Methods Totally 1 469 subjects were surveyed in the questionnaire investigation consisting of lifestyle, dietary assessment and symptoms of VDT by multistage stratified cluster sampling.Dietary patterns were derived by factor analysis based on validated food frequency questionnaires.We used multivariate unconditional Logistic regression models to evaluate the association between dietary patterns and VDT symptom risk using the lowest tertile of the dietary patterns scores as the reference category.Results Four major dietary patterns emerged from factor analysis, which were identified fast food pattern, meat pattern, plant pattern and balanced pattern, respectively.The accumulative contribution rate of the total factors accounts for 51.24%.In multivariable Logistic regression models with adjustment for age, sex, BMI, smoking, drinking, physical activity, hours of sleep and computer using, fast food pattern was found to be strong predictors of increasing the occurrence of VDT syndrome.The risk of VDT syndrome in the students at highest levels of factor score were 1.47 (95%CI = 1.08-1.99, P = 0.013) times than those whose factor score was in lowest tertile.However, the subjects who were closer to having balance dietary pattern, were under less risk of suffering from VDT syndrome.Compared to the lowest levels of factor score, the highest tertile had lower risk of VDT syndrome (OR = 0.71, 95%CI = 0.52-0.95) for the balanced pattern.Conclusion The intake of high-fat and high-sugar fast food is associated with an increased risk of VDT syndrome.In contrast, a nutritionally balanced diet can moderately reduce the risk of it.