Type 2 Diabetes and Risk of Hip Fractures and Non-Skeletal Fall Injuries in the Elderly – A Study from the Fractures and Fall Injuries in the Elderly Cohort (FRAILCO).

Questions remain about whether the increased risk of fractures in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2DM) is related mainly to increased risk of falling or to bone-specific properties. The primary aim of this study was to investigate the risk of hip fractures and non-skeletal fall injuries in older men and women with and without T2DM. We included 429,313 individuals (80.8 ± 8.2 years (mean ± SD), 58% women) from the Swedish registry "Senior Alert" and linked the data to several nation-wide registers. We identified 79,159 individuals with T2DM (45% with insulin (T2DM-I), 41% with oral antidiabetics (T2DM-O), and 14% with no antidiabetic treatment (T2DM-none)), and 343,603 individuals without diabetes. During a follow-up of approximately 670,000 person-years we identified in total 36,132 fractures (15,572 hip fractures) and 20,019 non-skeletal fall injuries. In multivariable Cox-regression models where the reference group was patients without diabetes and the outcome was hip fracture, T2DM-I was associated with increased risk (adjusted Hazard Ratio (HR) [95% CI] 1.24 [1.16-1.32]), T2DM-O with unaffected risk (1.03 [0.97-1.11]) and T2DM-none with reduced risk (0.88 [0.79-0.98]). Both the diagnosis of T2DM-I (HR 1.22 [1.16-1.29]) and T2DM-O (HR 1.12 [1.06-1.18]) but not T2DM-none (1.07 [0.98-1.16]) predicted non-skeletal fall injury. The same pattern was seen regarding other fractures (any, upper arm, ankle and major osteoporotic fracture) but not for wrist fracture. Subset-analyses revealed that in men, the risk of hip fracture was only increased in those with T2DM-I but in women, both the diagnosis of T2DM-O and T2DM-I were related to increased hip fracture risk. In conclusion, the risk of fractures differs substantially among patients with T2DM and an increased risk of hip fracture was primarily seen in insulin-treated patients, while the risk of non-skeletal fall injury was consistently increased in T2DM with any diabetes medication. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.