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Background: Knowledge on specific biological pathways mediating disease occurrence (e.g., inflammation) may be utilized to construct hypotheses-driven dietary patterns that take advantage of current evidence on disease-related hypotheses and the statistical methods of a posteriori patterns.

Objective: We developed and validated an empirical dietary inflammatory index (EDII) based on food groups.

Methods: We entered 39 pre-defined food groups in reduced rank regression models followed by stepwise linear regression analyses in the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS, n = 5230) to identify a dietary pattern most predictive of 3 plasma inflammatory markers: interleukin-6 (IL-6), C-reactive protein (CRP), and tumor necrosis factor α receptor 2 (TNFαR2). We evaluated the construct validity of the EDII in 2 independent samples from NHS-II (n = 1002) and Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS, n = 2632) using …