Association between amino acids and recent osteoporotic fracture: a matched incident case-control study.

Context: Osteoporotic fracture is a major public health issue globally. Human research on the association between amino acids (AAs) and fracture is still lacking.
Objective: To examine the association between AAs and recent osteoporotic fractures.
Methods: This age and sex matched incident case-control study identified 44 recent x-ray confirmed fracture cases in the Second Hospital of Jilin University and 88 community-based healthy controls aged 50+ years. Plasma AAs were measured by high performance liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry. After adjusting for covariates (i.e., body mass index, milk intake >1 time/week, falls and physical activity), we conducted conditional logistical regression models to test the association between AAs and fracture.
Results: Among cases there were 23 (52.3%) hip fractures and 21 (47.7%) non-hip fractures. Total, essential, and non-essential AAs were significantly lower in cases than in controls. In the multivariable conditional logistic regression models, after adjusting for covariates, each standard deviation increase in the total (odds ratio [OR]: 0.304; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.117-0.794), essential (OR: 0.408; 95% CI: 0.181-0.923) and non-essential AAs (OR: 0.290; 95%CI: 0.107-0.782) was negatively associated with recent fracture. These inverse associations were mainly found for hip fracture, rather than non-hip fractures. Among these AAs, lysine, alanine, arginine, glutamine, histidine and piperamide showed the significantly negative associations with fracture.
Conclusion: There was a negative relationship between AAs and recent osteoporotic fracture; such relationship appeared to be more obvious for hip fracture.
Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
(Copyright © 2024 Liang, Shi, Wang, Ma, Leslie, Lix, Shi, Kan and Yang.)