Correlation of Osteoporosis and Obesity
type: CreativeWork
description: Osteoporosis and obesity are two complex diseases that are prevalent in the United States. Obesity is a condition of excess body fat that exacerbates several major public health problems. Osteoporosis is a skeletal disease characterized by a reduction in bone mass. The relationship between obesity and osteoporosis has long been investigated. It is a widely held dogma that interventions lowering the risk of obesity may generally result in higher risk for osteoporosis. It is also believed that increasing body weight is related to higher bone mass and thus lower risk for osteoporosis. However, previous analyses generally confounded total body weight, of which the majority is skeletal muscle, with fat mass measurement for obesity. Also, the prior analyses did not duly control for increased mechanical loading due to larger total body weight in increasing bone mass. In this project I analyzed data collected from both China and USA. Whole body fat mass, lean mass, body mass index (BMI), and bone mass were measured in two samples: 1,988 unrelated Chinese subjects and 4,489 subjects from 512 Caucasian pedigrees. I first evaluated the Pearson correlation, then dissected the phenotypic correlations into genetic and environmental components with bone mass unadjusted or adjusted for body weight (to control for its mechanical loading effects on bone mass). I discovered that in both Chinese and Caucasians fat mass and BMI were, phenotypically, positively correlated with weight-unadjusted bone mass, in agreement with the dogma. However, when bone mass was adjusted for body weight, the phenotypic correlation (including its genetic and environmental components) between fat mass and bone mass turned out to be negative. These results indicate that when the mechanical loading effect of body weight on bone mass is adjusted for, increased fat mass is actually associated with decreased bone mass, both genetically and environmentally. Thus, in contrast to the dogma, my results show that bot…
abstract: Osteoporosis and obesity are two complex diseases that are prevalent in the United States. Obesity is a condition of excess body fat that exacerbates several major public health problems. Osteoporosis is a skeletal disease characterized by a reduction in bone mass. The relationship between obesity and osteoporosis has long been investigated. It is a widely held dogma that interventions lowering the risk of obesity may generally result in higher risk for osteoporosis. It is also believed that increasing body weight is related to higher bone mass and thus lower risk for osteoporosis. However, previous analyses generally confounded total body weight, of which the majority is skeletal muscle, with fat mass measurement for obesity. Also, the prior analyses did not duly control for increased mechanical loading due to larger total body weight in increasing bone mass. In this project I analyzed data collected from both China and USA. Whole body fat mass, lean mass, body mass index (BMI), and bone mass were measured in two samples: 1,988 unrelated Chinese subjects and 4,489 subjects from 512 Caucasian pedigrees. I first evaluated the Pearson correlation, then dissected the phenotypic correlations into genetic and environmental components with bone mass unadjusted or adjusted for body weight (to control for its mechanical loading effects on bone mass). I discovered that in both Chinese and Caucasians fat mass and BMI were, phenotypically, positively correlated with weight-unadjusted bone mass, in agreement with the dogma. However, when bone mass was adjusted for body weight, the phenotypic correlation (including its genetic and environmental components) between fat mass and bone mass turned out to be negative. These results indicate that when the mechanical loading effect of body weight on bone mass is adjusted for, increased fat mass is actually associated with decreased bone mass, both genetically and environmentally. Thus, in contrast to the dogma, my results show that bot…
author: Zhao, Lanjuan
language: en_US
date published: 2006-08
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:50:24Z
provider: Creighton University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Creighton University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/10504/55721