ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Endocrinol.
Sec. Bone Research
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fendo.2025.1643760
This article is part of the Research TopicCommunity Series in The Fundamental Biology of Basophils in Health and Disease - Volume IIView all 3 articles
Re-evaluating Basophil Count as a Hematological Indicator for Bone Density: A Subgroup Analysis from an East Asian Population
Provisionally accepted
- 1Hualien Armed Forces General Hospital, Hualien City, Taiwan
- 2National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
- 3Department of Applied Science, National Taitung University, Taitung, Taiwan
- 4Inti Taiwan, Inc., Hsinchu, Taiwan
- 5Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Tri-Service General Hospital Department of Medicine, Taipei City, Taiwan
- 6Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
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Background While traditional risk factors for osteoporosis such as age, sex, and menopause are well-established, emerging evidence suggests that immune cells may also influence bone metabolism. Among them, the role of basophils remains poorly understood. This study investigated the association between peripheral blood basophil count and lumbar spine bone mineral density (BMD) in an East Asian adult population. Methods A retrospective analysis was conducted on 200 adults undergoing health check-ups and lumbar dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Basophil count and other hematologic and biochemical parameters were correlated with lumbar spine T-scores using multivariate regression. Results Basophil count showed no significant correlation with T-scores in the overall cohort (r = 0.06, p = 0.4261). However, a weak inverse trend was noted in participants with BMI ≥ 27. In contrast, GPT and creatinine were significantly associated with BMD, with alanine aminotransferase (GPT) emerging as a strong independent predictor (β = 0.61, p < 0.001). Conclusions Basophil count does not appear to be a reliable biomarker for BMD in the general population. However, findings in the higher-BMI subgroup suggest a potential link that warrants further investigation. GPT may hold greater utility as a surrogate marker for bone health in clinical screening. The present findings also highlight the value of publishing negative results and underscore the need for future research in larger and more diverse cohorts.
Keywords: basophil count, Bone Mineral Density (BMD), Osteoporosis screening, alanineaminotransferase (GPT), Hematologic biomarker, metabolic bone disease, East Asian population, low-cost screening tool
Received: 09 Jun 2025; Accepted: 22 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Huang, Hong, Wang, Lee and Cheng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chao-Min Cheng, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
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