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. 2023 Mar 22:14:1121900.
doi: 10.3389/fendo.2023.1121900. eCollection 2023.

Circulating liver function markers and the risk of COPD in the UK Biobank

Wencong Du  1 , Haoyu Guan  2 , Xinglin Wan  2 , Zheng Zhu  1 , Hao Yu  1 , Pengfei Luo  1 , Lulu Chen  1 , Jian Su  1 , Yan Lu  3 , Dong Hang  2 , Ran Tao  1   2 , Ming Wu  1   2 , Jinyi Zhou  1   2 , Xikang Fan  1
Affiliations

Circulating liver function markers and the risk of COPD in the UK Biobank

Wencong Du et al. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). .

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the associations of circulating liver function marker levels with the risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Methods: We leveraged the data of 372,056 participants from the UK Biobank between 2006 and 2010. The assessed circulating liver function markers included alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), total bilirubin (TBIL), albumin (ALB), and total protein (TP). Incident COPD was identified through linkage to the National Health Service registries. Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).

Results: During a median follow-up period of 12.3 (interquartile range:11.4-13.2) years, we documented 10,001 newly diagnosed COPD cases. Lower levels of ALT, TBIL, ALB, and TP and higher levels of GGT and ALP were nonlinearly associated with elevated COPD risk. The HR (95% CI) for decile 10 vs. 1 was 0.92 (0.84-1.01) for ALT, 0.82 (0.75-0.89) for TBIL, 0.74 (0.67-0.81) for ALB, 0.96 (0.88-1.04) for TP, 1.45 (1.31-1.62) for GGT, and 1.31 (1.19-1.45) for ALP. Restricted cubic spline analyses suggested a U-shaped relationship between AST levels and COPD risk (P for nonlinearity <0.05).

Conclusion: We observed that all seven circulating liver function markers were nonlinearly associated with the risk of COPD, indicating the importance of liver function in COPD.

Keywords: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; liver function; liver-lung axis; prospective cohort study; serum biomarker.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Hazard ratios (95% confidence intervals) of incident COPD associated with circulating levels of liver function markers and the frequency histograms of liver function markers in the UK Biobank. The associations were examined by multivariate Cox regression models based on restricted cubic splines. The solid line represents estimates of hazard ratios and dashed lines represent 95% confidence intervals.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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