Inverse Association of Plasma Molybdenum with Metabolic Syndrome in a Chinese Adult Population: A Case-Control Study

Molybdenum has been found to be associated with metabolic disorders. However, the relationship between molybdenum and metabolic syndrome (MetS) is still unclear. A large case-control study was conducted in a Chinese population from the baseline of Ezhou-Shenzhen cohort. A total of 5356 subjects were included with 2678 MetS and 2678 controls matched by sex and age (±2 years). Medians (IQRs) of plasma molybdenum concentrations were 1.24 μg/L for MetS cases and 1.46 μg/L for controls. After adjustment for multiple covariates, the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for MetS were 1.00 (reference), 0.71 (0.59–0.84), 0.56 (0.46–0.68), and 0.47 (0.39–0.58) across quartiles of plasma molybdenum, and per SD increment of log-transformed molybdenum was associated with a 23% lower risk of MetS. In the spline analysis, the risk of MetS and its components decreased steeply with increasing molybdenum and followed by a plateau when the cutoff point was observed around 2.0 μg/L. The dose-dependent relationship of molybdenum with MetS remained consistent when considering other essential elements in the Bayesian kernel machine regression (BKMR) model. In our study, higher plasma molybdenum was significantly associated with a lower risk of MetS, as well as its components, in a dose-response manner.