High alcohol consumption and early hip fracture risk in men and women

Our aim was to study whether hospitalizations due to high alcohol consumption, as an objective indicator of high alcohol consumption, is associated with hip fractures in non-elderly adults. The participants in this study consist of 10,043 men and women in a survey study in Stockholm 1969-70, when they were 18–25 years old. We used data on hospitalization events due to a hip fracture or a diagnosis indicating high alcohol consumption from 1970 to 2016 acquired from the National Patient Register. This allowed 47 years of follow-up, until the participants were 65–72 years old, an age-span that can be described as “non-elderly adults”. A Cox regression model was used to estimate the hazard ratio (HR) of hip fractures, comparing individuals with and without a diagnosis indicating high alcohol consumption, treating this exposure as a time-varying covariate. There were 151 participants with at least one hip fracture, 86 women and 65 men. There were 450 participants, 173 women and 277 men, who had an alcohol related event, as an indication of alcohol abuse, during the follow-up time of which 24 (10 women and 14 men) also experienced a hip fracture. We found an elevated HR for hip fractures for non-elderly women (HR = 4.59, 95% CI = 2.12–9.95, p < 0.001) and men (HR = 7.65, 95% CI = 4.07–14.36, p < 0.001) with a previous hospitalization-diagnosis indicating high alcohol consumption.