A Reminder on Maintaining Bone Health

Is fear, ignorance or procrastination putting you at risk of a devastating bone fracture?

Most of the news about osteoporosis concerbs the side effects os current therapies and preventives. But it is important to put these effects in perpective- and to focus on treatment benefits and pratical measures that can help to prevent costly and debilitating fractures in fragile bones.

Osteoporosis is both underdiagnosed and undertreated. Doctor say it is underdiagnosed because many who have it fail to get a bone desity test, sometimes even after they suffer a fracture. The condition is undertreated because some people avoid drug therapy for fear of side effects, while others take their medications erratically or stop taking them altogether without consulting their doctors.

Is is easy to understand the prevailing concern. People hear about drug sid effects like osteonecrosis, or bone death, of the jaw (extremely rare and mostly in cancer patients) and unusual fractures of the thigh bone. They hear that supplements of bone -building calcium cam increase the risk of heart attack or stroke.

Some 10 milion Americans heve osteoporosis, and 34 milion more with low bone mass are at risk of developing it. It is a silent disease that typically first shows up as low-trauma fracture of the hip, spine or wrist. Low-trauma does bot mean no trauma; someone with healthy bones who falls from a standing height or less is unlikely to break a bone, according to Dr. Sundeep Khosla, president of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.

While women are the far more frequent victims of osteoporosis and develop it at a younger age, men -espeally those over 70- are also at risk and even less likely than women to have the disease diagnosed an treated.

(New York Times, October 31, 2011; New York - USA)

The quoted sentence "Low-trauma does not mean no trauma", if report, would be