BREAKING research from Kaohsiung Medical University, Taiwan, suggests that adults with Type 2 diabetes who use statins have a lower risk of hip fracture. Researchers enrolled patients who were newly diagnosed Type 2 diabetics from the Diabetes Mellitus Health Database as part of the National Health Insurance Research Database in Taiwan. All participants had been diagnosed between 2010 and 2014 and had been prescribed medication for 3 months within the first year of diagnosis.
The medication codes for all statins were identified. The cumulative daily dose was defined as the sum of the dispensed daily dose for 60 months since diagnosis. Participants with a cumulative dose of >28 mg were considered ‘statin users’ and the remaining participants were ‘non-users’. Propensity score matching by diagnosis year, sex, and age was performed to minimise selection bias between the two test groups. A total of 188,588 patients with Type 2 diabetes using statins were matched with patients with Type 2 who did not use statins in a 1:1 ratio. Hospital discharge codes identified hip fractures in the research population, with follow-up continuing until 31 December 2019.
Follow-up identified that 1.48% of participants in the statin group and 3.17% of participants in the non-users group sustained a hip fracture. Thus, adults who used statins had a lower risk of hip fractures than non-users (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR]: 0.47; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.44–0.50; p<0.001). Subgroup analyses were also performed for different dose ranges. The 28–174 mg dose group had a higher risk for hip fracture than the non-user group (aHR: 1.29; 95% CI: 1.11–1.51; p=0.001), but the 175–447 mg dose group (aHR: 0.67; 95% CI: 0.56–0.80; p<0.001) and the >447 mg dose group (aHR: 0.36; 95% CI: 0.28–0.44; p<0.001) demonstrated a lower risk than the non-user group.
Mei‐Ling Ho, Department of Physiology at Kaohsiung Medical University, commented that, to the best of their knowledge, “this is the first population‐based propensity‐matched retrospective cohort study that assesses the effects of statin use on hip fracture risk in patients newly diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.” The main findings indicate that statin use was associated with a decreased risk of hip fractures in patients with Type 2 diabetes, and thus the findings could contribute to wider public health implications.
