Red blood cell folate and benign prostatic hyperplasia: results from the NHANES 2001-2008

Abstract

Background

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) affects 30% of men worldwide, folate is essential for life. However, few studies have investigated the relationship between folate levels and BPH. The present study aims to explore the relationship between red blood cell (RBC) folate, a better indicator of long-term folate intake, and BPH in United States (US) men.

Methods

We used statistics from four cycles of the “National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey” (NHANES2001-2008), RBC folate data come from laboratory data and BPH date come from questionnaire data. A multivariate conditional logistic regression model and subgroup analysis were using to assess the association between RBC folate and BPH.

Results

647 males from four survey cycles in the NHANES2001-2008, of which, 574 men (88.7%) had BPH. After adjusting for potential confounders, a considerable correlation was observed between RBC folate and BPH; With the first quintiles of RBC folate as the reference, multivariable-adjusted odds ratios (ORs) and confidence intervals (95% CIs) of the second, third, fourth, and the highest quintiles were 1.19 (0.58 ∼ 2.44), 1.39 (0.65 ∼ 2.97), 2.27 (0.96 ∼ 5.39), 2.26 (1.35 ∼ 3.76) and 5.37 (1.85 ∼ 15.59), respectively.

Conclusions

Individuals with high levels of RBC folate were associated with an increased risk of self-reported benign prostatic hyperplasia of US men.

Keywords:

• Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH)
• red blood cell (RBC)
• folate
• NHANES
• cross-sectional study

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Professor Liu Jie from the Renmin Hospital of Renmin University of China, who provided data support, research, and design consultation for this study and reviewed it.

Ethical approval and patient consent statement

The “NHANES” campaign was approved by the Ethics Review Committee of the NCHS, and a personal informed consent was signed before participating in the study.

Authors’ contributions

YuanPeng Huang: drafted the work and revised it critically for important content; Tingting Chen: collected and analyzed the data, prepared figures and tables and Write the manuscript. All writers have read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

This provides a set of public data for this study. All data applied in this study can be searched on the NHANES website (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/index.htm), and more detailed analysis data can be obtained by contacting the corresponding author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province (Approval number: 2023J011627) and Science and Technology Project of Fujian Provincial Health Commission (Approval number: 2023CXB003).