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Special Feature |
Laboratoire dExplorations Fonctionnelles (J.-C.S., E.L.-B.) et de Biochimie A (B.H.) Hôpital Necker-Enfants Malades; Service de Rhumatologie (A.K., C.C.) Hôpital Cochin; and Service de Chirurgie (E.S.), Hôpital Saint-Louis, Assistance Publique-Hopitaux de Paris (AP-HP), Paris, France
Address all correspondence and requests for reprints to: J. C. Souberbielle, M.D., Laboratoire dExplorations Fonctionnelles, Húpital Necker-Enfants Malades, 149 rue de Sëvres, 75015 Paris, France. E-mail: jean-claude.souberbielle{at}nck.ap-hop-paris.fr.
| Abstract |
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2 = 2.8; NS). Forty-two group 2 patients had a surgically proven PHPT. Among these, serum PTH was
65 ng/liter in 17 (40.5%) and
46 ng/liter in 5 (12%). In conclusion, our proposed PTH reference range allows to identify fewer patients with mild surgically proven PHPT who have a normal serum PTH concentration, without inducing an increase in the rate of falsely high PTH. | Introduction |
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| Patients and Methods |
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We reviewed the medical chart of 708 consecutive osteopenic/porotic patients (74 premenopausal women, 552 menopausal women and 82 men) aged 59.2 ± 13.4 yr. They were referred to our bone/calcium metabolism unit over a 1-yr period (from July 17, 2000, to July 16, 2001) by their primary care physician in search of secondary causes for their low bone mass. The patients came on a single morning to our unit after an overnight fast with a 24-h urine collection obtained at home and had a blood and urine sample for an extensive biological evaluation (EBE) as described in the following Laboratory methods. They also answered a questionnaire aiming to quantify their daily calcium diet (5). Finally, a chart was constituted that included the following data: age, years since menopause for women, weight, actual height and height at the age of 25 yr, the results of previous densitometric and laboratory explorations (if any), history of smoking and alcohol consumption, level of exercise and sunshine exposure, present or previous use of drugs known to affect bone/calcium metabolism (glucocorticoids, anticonvulsants, thiazide diuretics, furosemide, lithium, hormone replacement therapy, bisphosphonates or other antiresorptive treatments, calcium and/or vitamin D supplementation), and medical history (fractures, nephrolithiasis, endocrinopathies, and any situation that induced a more than 2-month period of immobilization). In some of these patients, a second evaluation including an oral calcium load test (6) was performed approximately 2 months later when doubt concerning the diagnosis remained after the EBE, especially in case of unexplained hypercalciuria or suspicion of normocalcemic primary hyperparathyroidism. Our analysis was carried out in two phases.
At first we aimed to evaluate the rate of PTH concentrations greater than 46 ng/liter in patients with an apparently normal calcium metabolism. We considered the data from the complete medical chart that allowed us to classify our patients into two groups. Group 1 included all the patients for whom no reasons for high PTH (see below) were found after examination of their chart. Use of calcium or vitamin D supplementation, adequately treated hypothyroidism (normal TSH), a history of nephrolithiasis without disorder of calcium metabolism, or previous successful surgery for PHPT were not an a priori cause of exclusion from group 1. Group 2 included patients with a documented potential reason for an increased PTH concentration. Our inclusion criteria for group 2 were hyper- or hypocalcemia, normocalcemic PHPT, renal hypercalciuria (these two last conditions were documented by the results of an oral calcium load test), vitamin D deficiency/insufficiency (defined by a serum 25OHD concentration of 30 nmol/liter with our in-house assay) (3), chronic renal failure defined by a glomerular filtration rate (GFR) assessed with the creatinine clearance, 30 ml/min, use of bisphosphonates (present or in the previous 6 months), and any other chronic disease known to potentially alter calcium metabolism including sarcoidosis, untreated or insufficiently treated hypothyroidism documented by a clearly increased TSH concentration, and chronic diseases associated with malabsorption such as celiac disease or cystic fibrosis. When a patient had more than one inclusion criterion for group 2, he or she was classified according to the ranking described above (e.g. a hypercalcemic patient with a low vitamin D store is classified as hypercalcemic). We then considered the serum PTH concentration from the EBE and compared the percentage of group 1 patients with a serum PTH greater than 46 ng/liter (group 1b) to 3%, which corresponds to the theoretical rate of normal subjects that should present a concentration above the 97th percentile of the reference range. In case of a significant difference, it was decided to increase our upper limit of normal PTH by steps of 1 ng/liter until the percentage of high values is not different from 3%.
In the second phase, we aimed to evaluate the rate of falsely normal PTH concentrations in PHPT. We, therefore, constituted a subgroup by considering only the group 2 patients who had surgically proven PHPT. Among these patients we counted those with PTH concentrations of
65 ng/liter and
46 ng/liter, respectively.
All patients were informed that their biological data were going to be reviewed in this study, and they gave their consent for that.
Laboratory methods
As stated above, for every patient the EBE was performed on a 24-h urine collection obtained at home and basal fasting blood and urine (second morning void) samples collected between 0830 and 1000 h in our laboratory. A serum aliquot was stored at -20 C to measure 1,25 dihydroxy vitamin D (1,25(OH)2D) when necessary. Serum ionized calcium (Ca2+) was measured by electrometry within a few minutes after sampling (ICa2, Radiometer, Copenhagen, Denmark). Serum and urinary total calcium, phosphate, sodium, and creatinine were measured by means of an automated chemistry analyser (Synchron CX4, Beckman Instruments, Brea, CA). Serum albumin and total alkaline phosphatase activity were measured by colorimetry. Serum TSH was measured with a semiautomated chemiluminescent assay (Behring Diagnostics, Rueil Malmaison, France). Serum PTH was measured by an immunoradiometric assay kit (Allegro Intact PTH, Nichols Institute, San Juan Capistrano, CA). Serum 25OHD (7) and 1,25(OH)2D (8) were measured by radiocompetition after extraction and column purification.
Expression of results
Continuous variables are expressed as mean ± SD. Between-group comparisons were assessed by ANOVA. Percentages were compared by the
2 test. Correlations were assessed by the Spearman
test. A P value of 0.05 was considered as significant.
| Results |
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2 = 2.8; NS). We thus considered that there was no need to increase our upper limit of normal PTH above 46 ng/liter. None of the 15 group 1b patients had a serum PTH above 65 ng/liter, and it should be noted that although not having strict criteria of exclusion from group 1 as described in the Patients section, four of these group 1b patients had a low GFR (creatinine clearance of 33, 38, 43, and 48 ml/min), one was treated with high doses of glucocorticoids at the moment of evaluation and two had a very low daily calcium intake (175 and 225 mg per 24 h). Among the 348 group 2 patients, 46 (13.2%) had a serum PTH concentration above 65 ng/liter, whereas 126 (36.2%) had a serum PTH concentration above 46 ng/liter. Details concerning the percentages of serum PTH levels above 46 and 65 ng/liter in the different subgroups of group 2 are shown in Table 2
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65 ng/liter in 17 patients (40.5%) and
46 ng/liter in 5 patients (12%). The PTH concentration of the two patients with normal Ca2+ was 159 and 57 ng/liter, respectively. These two patients had no other reason to have a high serum PTH, and they had an oral calcium load test that showed only a small decrease in serum PTH despite a significant increase in Ca2+.
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| Discussion |
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The use of our proposed PTH reference range could also induce an increase in the detection of high serum PTH in otherwise normocalcemic patients. Before the diagnosis of normocalcemic PHPT can be established, it will be highly important to rule out carefully any other potential causes of high PTH as outlined (9). This includes any chronic disease associated with malabsorption such as cystic fibrosis (13) or celiac disease (14), both conditions often being associated with vitamin D deficiency endocrinopathies such as hypothyroidism (15), renal hypercalciuria (16), chronic renal failure (the definition of which must be more clearly defined in terms of GFR), very low daily calcium intake, use of drugs having an influence on calcium metabolism such as anticonvulsants (17), furosemide (18), lithium (19), or bisphosphonates (20), and vitamin D insufficiency. Concerning this last condition, it is now consensual that serum 25OHD is the correct functional indicator of vitamin D status (21). However, not all the patients with a low serum 25OHD concentration have a high PTH concentration. We found that 26% of our osteoporotic patients who had a serum 25OHD level
30 nmol/liter had a serum PTH above 46 ng/liter, whereas only 7% had a PTH above 65 ng/liter, a result highly comparable with what we found in healthy elderly subjects (3). One can consider that the cut-off we used for 25OHD (30 nmol/liter) to define vitamin D insufficiency is quite conservative. Indeed higher cut-offs are considered, usually 50 nmol/liter (2, 9, 22, 23), although higher values up to 75 nmol/liter and above are also suggested (24, 25). It should be stressed, however, that discrepancies among 25OHD assays have been published (26, 27, 28), and we have recently reported that our in-house 25OHD assay gives results that are approximately 30% lower than the most currently used assays (29). Our cut-off is thus closer to the more widely accepted value of 50 nmol/liter.
It was recently recommended by Bilezikian et al. (9) that "better-defined normative values for age, gender, menopausal status, and race for both PTH and calcium would be helpful." This is an important point because it has been reported that serum PTH is higher in black than white people (30, 31, 32) and in the elderly than the young (33, 34). However, 25OHD is also known to be usually lower in black than white people (30) and in the elderly than the young (34), and this can explain part of the higher PTH found in blacks and elderly people. We thus propose that the above-mentioned recommendation should be reevaluated after elimination from a reference population of any subject with vitamin D insufficiency. This supposes that, when establishing a PTH reference range, 25OHD must be measured beforehand and the 25OHD cut-off has been clearly defined in the various populations to be tested.
In conclusion, we have shown that excluding subjects with low serum 25OHD has a significant impact on the PTH reference range (3) and allows to identify more patients with mild PHPT and high serum PTH, without inducing an increase in the rate of falsely high PTH. This may be important in light of the recent proposition to measure PTH routinely in osteoporotic women in search of secondary diagnoses and the recent recommendation to consider osteoporosis at any bone site as a criterion for surgery in PHPT patients.
| Footnotes |
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Received January 22, 2003.
Accepted March 24, 2003.
| References |
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