Case-control design across 52 countries on all six inhabited continents; this dietary-pattern analysis used 5,761 first-MI cases and 10,646 matched controls with dietary data. Factor analysis identified three dietary patterns: “Oriental” (tofu, soy, other sauces), “Western” (fried foods, salty snacks, eggs, meat), and “Prudent” (fruit, vegetables). Eggs loaded onto the Western pattern, which was not significantly associated with MI risk after adjustment; the Prudent pattern was inversely associated with MI (adjusted OR 0.70, 95% CI 0.61-0.80, top vs bottom quartile).
relevance_note: CAVEAT — egg intake here is only one loading item inside a composite “Western” dietary-pattern factor score, not an isolated egg exposure with its own effect estimate; this is the weakest-fitting primary in this slice for the main question and should be weighted down accordingly. Included because the FLF search brief explicitly named INTERHEART and it is the only genuinely cross-continental case-control (vs cohort) design in the pool, and the only source testing whether an egg-containing pattern (rather than eggs alone) predicts MI.