Nutritional rickets is caused by a combination of low vitamin D status and insufficient calcium consumption. In rickets, serum alkaline phosphatase (AP) activity is an indicator of poor mineralization. The purpose of this study was to see how well blood AP activity performed in detecting nutritional rickets in calcium-deficient Nigerian children. Researchers used a multivariate logistic regression to examine the chances of rickets related with AP activity, controlling for age, gender, and weight-for-age z-score in a case-control study of children with active rickets and matched control individuals without rickets.A total of 122 children with rickets and 119 healthy children were involved in the study. Rachitic children had an average (SD) age of 54 29 months, with 55 being male. Dietary calcium consumption was poor in both cases and controls. Serum AP activity levels were 812 415 and 245 78 U/L in patients and controls, respectively. AP was shown to be inversely related to 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels. The odds ratio receiver operating characteristic curve in the adjusted model was 0.978. Nutritional rickets were detected in Nigerian children with AP > 350 U/L with sensitivity 0.93, specificity 0.92, positive likelihood ratio 11.3, and negative likelihood ratio 0.07.
An AP > 350 U/L successfully distinguished Nigerian children with and without nutritional rickets. AP is a low-cost biochemical test that might be used to screen for nutritional rickets; however, cutoff values need to be validated in different groups, and laboratory data must be standardised for large population research.
Reference:https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/106/9/e3559/6274864?redirectedFrom=fulltext
