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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 7|pp 10555—10583

Differential relationship of uric acid to mortality and clinical biomarkers of aging according to grip strength in older adults: a cohort study

Sin-Mei Guo1, Yen-Tze Liu1,3,4, Sin-Ru He1,3, Ming-Shiang Wu2, Wei-Ting Tseng2, Ray-Chin Wu2, I-Chien Wu2,5
  • 1The Department of Family Medicine, Changhua Christian Hospital, Changhua, Taiwan
  • 2Institute of Population Health Sciences, National Health Research Institutes, Zhunan, Taiwan
  • 3Institute of Medicine, Chung Shan Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan
  • 4Department of Holistic Wellness, MingDao University, Changhua, Taiwan
  • 5Graduate Institute of Biomedical Sciences, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan
* Equal contribution
Received: November 23, 2020Accepted: March 4, 2021Published: April 4, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202820

Copyright: © 2021 Guo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Uric acid is both a pro-oxidant and antioxidant. We investigated serum uric acid's association with mortality and aging biomarkers in older adults with varying levels of grip strength. A total of 5329 community-dwelling adults aged ≥55 years underwent assessments of serum uric acid levels, grip strength, and biomarkers of diverse physiological systems. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality. We observed a significant (P < .001) interaction between uric acid levels and grip strength on all-cause mortality risk. Among participants with low grip strength, a nonlinear association (P for nonlinearity = .006) was observed between serum uric acid levels and mortality risk after multivariate adjustment. Compared with participants with neither extreme uric acid levels nor low grip strength, those with a combination of high serum uric acid and low grip strength exhibited greater risks of mortality (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR], 1.52; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.15–2.02) and deviations in biomarkers of specific systems, so did those with a combination of low serum uric acid and low grip strength (aHR, 1.52; 95% CI, 1.13–2.05). In conclusion, there was a J-shaped association between serum uric acid and the risk of all-cause mortality in older adults. This was primarily true for those with low grip strength.