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University Hospital Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
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Editor’s note: Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) may be associated with an increased risk of fracture owing to both reduced bone mineral density and spinal rigidity. Although there is some evidence that the prevalence of vertebral, but not non-vertebral, fractures is higher in patients with AS than in those without, there have been no large-scale studies investigating this. In this report, the authors carried out a case–control study comparing 231436 patients with fractures with 231362 age- and sex-matched control subjects without fractures, whose details had been recorded in the UK General Practice Research Database. Data from 683 practices collected between 1988 and 1999 were included.