Research Article: Association between nutritional?inflammatory status and diabetic retinopathy in adults with diabetes: insights from a US population?based survey and a Chinese hospital?based clinical cohort
Abstract:
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the predominant cause of vision loss in working-age adults. The glucocentric model cannot fully account for its pathogenesis, and emerging evidence highlights the significant roles of nutritional status and inflammation. However, the precise value of composite nutritional-inflammatory-related indices in DR has yet to be systematically evaluated in diverse ethnic populations.
This dual-cohort study analyzed data from 3,715 adults with diabetes in NHANES (2005–2018) and a hospital-based clinical cohort of 252 type 2 diabetes patients from a tertiary eye center. We systematically examined associations between DR and the prognostic nutritional index (PNI), geriatric nutritional risk index (GNRI), albumin-bilirubin (ALBI) score, and neutrophil percentage-to-albumin ratio (NPAR) using weighted multivariable logistic regression, restricted cubic splines (RCS), and subgroup analyses. Threshold effect analysis identified critical inflection points for nonlinear associations. Three sensitivity analyses were conducted.
In the NHANES cohort after multivariable adjustment, the highest versus lowest tertiles of PNI (OR = 0.57; 95% CI: 0.41–0.80) and GNRI (OR = 0.56; 95% CI: 0.41–0.76) were associated with reduced DR risk, whereas the highest tertiles of ALBI (OR = 1.58; 95% CI: 1.18–2.19) and NPAR (OR = 1.37; 95% CI: 1.02–1.83) conferred elevated risk, with all relationships demonstrating significant dose–response trends. These associations were corroborated, with even stronger effect sizes, in the hospital-based clinical cohort, where PNI and GNRI declined progressively with increasing DR severity, while ALBI and NPAR rose incrementally. RCS confirmed nonlinear associations between PNI/GNRI and DR, and threshold effect analyses identified cohort-specific inflection points (NHANES: PNI = 56.00, GNRI = 98.27; clinical cohort: PNI = 42.85, GNRI = 90.39). Subgroup analyses showed stronger protective effects of PNI among overweight/obese individuals and stronger risk associations for ALBI in women. Sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of these findings.
This dual-cohort study provides robust and cross-ethnic evidence that PNI and GNRI are inversely linked to DR, whereas ALBI and NPAR show positive associations, and the hospital-based clinical cohort further links these indices to DR severity. These findings highlight the utility of these accessible nutritional-inflammatory-related indices as pragmatic tools for DR risk stratification and early warning.
Introduction:
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the predominant cause of vision loss in working-age adults. The glucocentric model cannot fully account for its pathogenesis, and emerging evidence highlights the significant roles of nutritional status and inflammation. However, the precise value of composite nutritional-inflammatory-related indices in DR has yet to be systematically evaluated in diverse ethnic populations.
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