Estimation and projection about the standardized prevalence of osteoporosis in mainland China

We performed a systematic analysis of the standardized prevalence of osteoporosis in mainland China from 1990 to 2050.

Osteoporosis is the most common bone disease. We aimed to investigate the standardized prevalence of osteoporosis in mainland China at the national and regional levels, with projections until 2050.

A comprehensive literature search was performed in PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, CNKI, Wanfang, and CBM-SinoMed. We constructed resample sets to calculate the standardized prevalence in each study. Multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression was used to estimate the age-specific and sex-specific prevalence. The United Nations Population Division (UNPD) data and regional population data from the fifth and sixth censuses in mainland China were used to estimate and project the national and regional prevalence of osteoporosis.

The standardized prevalence of osteoporosis ranged from 5.04% (2.12~11.34%) to 7.46% (3.13~16.32%) in males aged ≥ 50 years and from 26.28% (15.38~40.40%) to 39.19% (25.74~53.95%) in females aged ≥ 50 years from 1990 to 2050. Moreover, we did not find a significant difference in the standardized prevalence among three geographic regions (Central China, West China, and East China).

We found that osteoporosis is a serious public health challenge in mainland China. The findings in our study add insight into the epidemiology of osteoporosis and would be beneficial for the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis in mainland China.