Background: Age-related macular degeneration is the primary cause of irreversible blindness in developed countries, whereas the global prevalence of osteoporosis-a major public health problem-is 19.7%. Both diseases may coincide in populations aged >50 years, leading to serious health deterioration and decreased quality of life.
Objectives: This study aimed to analyze the relationship between age-related macular degeneration and osteopenia, defined as decreased bone mineral density, in the Polish population.
Methods: Participants were derived from the population-based Bialystok PLUS Study. Randomized individuals were stratified into two groups, those with age-related macular degeneration (AMD-1 group) or without age-related macular degeneration (AMD-0 group). Using a cutoff value of -1.0 to identify low bone mass, participants with femoral bone mineral density T-scores above -1.0 were assigned to the normal reference, and those with T-scores below -1.0 were assigned to the osteopenia category. Among 436 Caucasian participants aged 50-80 years (252 women, 184 men), the prevalence of age-related macular degeneration was 9.9% in women and 12.0% in men. Decreased bone mineral density based on T-scores was observed in 36.9% of women and in 18.9% of men. Significant differences in femoral bone mineral density between the AMD-0 and AMD-1 groups were detected only in men (mean difference [95% confidence interval] = 0.11 (0.02; 0.13); p = 0.012 for femoral bone mineral density, and 0.73 [0.015; 0.94]; p = 0.011 for the femoral T-score). No associations were observed between bone mineral density and age-related macular degeneration in women.
Conclusion: Decreased femoral bone mineral density may be associated with a higher risk of age-related macular degeneration in men, but a causal link remains unclear.
Copyright: © 2023 Budnik et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.