Prophylaxis of Osteoporosis

One of the most important units of health care is the osteoporosis prevention. A crucial part in it is the diagnosis of osteoporosis. Unfortunately osteoporosis is diagnosed often too late after occurring of fractures trough small trauma or even spontaneous fractures.

For example patients come in the clinic with back bone pain for months and after an X-ray picture we already see one or more vertebral body sintering fractures. Unfortunately to diagnose osteoporosis after occurring of fractures is too late, because the healing process is too long, painful and costs too much money to health care system.

That is why the health care system tries to find a solution of this problem by importing some method of diagnosing osteoporosis earlier than its manifestations such as bone densitometry test.

Bone densitometry tests is a high recommended test which determines the density (or the calcium content) of the bone through its X-ray resorption. 

However…..

Unfortunately in my experience as a doctor in an orthopedic clinic I have observed a lot of patients with spontaneous fractures which have normal results in a bone densitometry test. If they get fractures without a trauma after physiological movements what should be the reason for their fractures? This proves perhaps that osteoporosis and calcium level in bones may be connected with osteoporosis, but not the main reason for fractures, doesn’t it?

The explanation of this paradox is that through degenerative changes of bones the bone density test accepts for example exophytes as normal bone and falsifies the results.

Unfortunately this happens very often…