Uric acid influences the relationship between unsafe neighborhood and digestive diseases among middle-aged or older adults: a longitudinal cohort study from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS)

Description

Jiayin Du and colleagues used a long-running Chinese aging cohort to untangle how childhood adversity, uric acid, and digestive disease in later life connect. Their 2026 longitudinal study followed 3,666 middle-aged and older adults, of whom 617 developed digestive disorders, modeling risks with survival analysis and testing uric acid as a go-between.

Growing up around household mental illness, or in an unsafe neighborhood, each predicted later digestive disease, and uric acid levels were themselves tied to digestive disorders. The mediation result was subtle: the unsafe neighborhood effect ran partly through uric acid in a negative direction, complicating any simple story that more uric acid means more harm. The pattern held across demographic subgroups. The authors call for work on mechanisms and on preventing childhood adversity whose health shadow reaches into old age.

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Source: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/PMC13595720