Association between serum urea nitrogen levels and prostate-specific antigens (NHANES 2003-2010)

Increasing evidence suggests that serum urea nitrogen may be a risk factor for prostate cancer (PCa) and influence serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) concentrations, but direct evidence of a relationship between PSA and serum urea nitrogen levels in the general population is still lacking. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the relationship between serum urea nitrogen levels and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and prostate cancer.

We conducted a cross-sectional study using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, 2003-2010) database. We performed a multifactorial regression analysis of the association between serum urea nitrogen levels and PSA and PCa, followed by subgroup analyses.

A total of 5256 subjects were included in this study, and after adjusting for demographic, biological, and immunologic variables, we found that there was a threshold for blood urea nitrogen concentration below which every 1 ng/mL increase in serum urea nitrogen was associated with a 0.0325 ng/mL increase in PSA concentration (log2 transformed) (95% CI: 0.0064, 0.0586), and the P trend was was less than 0.05 and the difference was statistically significant. Sensitivity analyses using the generalized additive model (GAM) showed a linear relationship between serum urea nitrogen and serum PSA concentrations when blood urea nitrogen concentrations ranged from 0 ng/ml to 6.78 ng/ml.

Serum urea nitrogen was independently and positively correlated with serum PSA concentration when the concentration of serum urea nitrogen ranged from 0 ng/ml to 6.78 ng/ml.