High Serum Uric Acid Was a Risk Factor for Incident Asthma: An Open Cohort Study

Abstract

Background

Several cross-sectional studies have suggested an association between SUA and asthma. However, few studies have investigated this relationship longitudinally. Although SUA is an independent risk factor for chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular diseases, its contribution to incident asthma remains uncertain.

Objective

To determine whether a high SUA was a risk factor for adult incident asthma.

Methods

By using health care data from the Shandong multicenter health check-up, 76,369 participants, aged 20 to 79 years, were identified who had an SUA determination with a mean follow-up period of 3.73±2.21 years. Multivariate modeling employed Cox proportional hazards models to verify the association between SUA and incident asthma by adjusting age, BMI, smoking habits, drinking habits, and asthma-like diseases.

Results

A total of 51,389 individuals were included in the analysis. Cut-off values of SUA able to discriminate asthma status were identified by means of maximally selected rank statistics in the whole participants (≥376.80umol/L), women (≥314.45umol/L), and men (≥376.80umol/L). Multivariate Cox regression analyses adjusted for covariates (age, body mass index (BMI), smoking habit, drinking habit, and asthma-like disease) identified an independent association between SUA and incident asthma in the whole participants (hazard ratio (HR) 2.92, 95% confidence intervals (CI), 1.76–4.48, P=0.00) and men (HR 3.02, 95% CI 1.70–5.39, P=0.00), but not in women.

Conclusion

The results of the current study confirmed that high SUA was an independent risk factor for incident asthma after adjustment of potential covariates and suggested that a cut-off value related to incident asthma could be identified only in men.

Keywords:

• cut-off value
• asthma
• gender
• serum uric acid
• risk factor

Abbreviations

HR, hazard ratio; CI, confidence interval; BMI, body mass index; COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; SUA, serum uric acid; UA, uric acid; IQR, interquartile range.

Author Contributions

All authors contributed to data analysis, drafting or revising the article, have agreed on the journal to which the article will be submitted, gave final approval of the version to be published, and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Disclosure

The authors have declared no conflicts of interest. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Key Research and Development Program of Shandong Province (Grant No. 2019GSF108198), and the Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Team Project of Shandong University (Grant Nos. IFYT1811, IFYT18036, and IFYT18037). The funding bodies were not involved in the design of the study, the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data and the preparation of the manuscript.