Objective To analyze the association between nutritional indices between bone mineral density (BMD) and risk of fracture in patients undergoing maintenance hemodialysis. Methods This was a cross-sectional and prospective observational cohort study. A non-chronic kidney disease (CKD) control group was set. Calcaneus ultrasonic BMD T score was measured. Hip circumference and other nutritional indices were measured for patients on hemodialysis who were followed up for incident fracture events. Results One hundred and thirty-one patients on stable hemodialysis and 77 controls were enrolled. BMD T scores of hemodialysis patients were significantly lower than those in controls (?2.9 vs ?2.0, P<0.001). It was consistent after adjudication for multiple factor adjudication (F=11.042, P=0.001). Multivariate linear regression analysis demonstrated that BMD was associated with dialysis, age, and sex significantly, but was not associated with hip circumference and body mass index(BMI). Meanwhile, it demonstrated that age and sex were associated with BMD (P values were 0.02 and 0.005, respectively) for patients on hemodialysis alone. Ten incident fractures occurred (7.6%) over the median follow-up of 81.0 months. Multivariate binary logistic regression analysis showed that longer years on hemodialysis therapy, larger hip circumference, lower BMI, and more severe anemia contributed to higher risk of incident fractures. OR (95% CI) values were 1.029 (1.007, 1.051), 1.485(1.016, 2.171), 0.414(0.193, 0.891), and 0.827(0.691, 0.989), respectively (all P <0.05) after controlling for BMD, diabetes, and parathyroid hormone etc. Conclusion This study shows that calcaneus BMD T scores in hemodialysis patients are lower than those in non-CKD controls, which was independent on nutritional indices etc. Nutritional indices including larger hip circumference and lower BMI etc contributed to higher risk of incident fracture, which suggested that reducing hip circumference and improving BMI may decrease the risk of incident fracture in patients on hemodialysis. |