Healthcare Professionals Category
More Women Than Breast Cancer, Heart Attack & Stroke Combined
Osteoporotic Fractures disable, disfigure, and kill more women each year than breast cancer, heart attack, and stroke combined. Half of all women over age 50 will suffer an Osteoporotic (Fragility) Fracture in their lifetime. Some will die. Some will be permanently deformed. Some will require nursing home care for the rest of their lives.
Millions strive for The Cure for breast cancer. Millions have joined Go Red For Women sponsored by the American Heart Association. These are wonderful efforts. But what about the millions of women harmed each year by Osteoporotic Fracture? They suffer a “Bone Attack”. When will we care enough about osteoporosis to launch a similar campaign?
Orthopods Are Dealing With Osteoporosis
This week I spent 2 days advising Orthopedic Surgeons about how to deal with Osteoporotic patients. Identifying the Osteoporotic (Fragility) Fracture is the easy part. Correcting the Osteoporosis is more challenging.
Orthopods are often too busy treating the recent fracture to do a complete work-up and initiate correction of the Osteoporosis. Unfortunately, many pimary care docs are also too busy treating (now out of control because of the fracture) diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, pulmonary problems, etc in the weeks after a fracture. Setting up a system is key to getting a complete bone health evaluation and treatment before everyone, patient included, forgets to try to prevent further fractures.
Welcome to ISCD 2012
What determines “osteoporosis”? Is it DXA and BMD? Perhaps VFA and the lateral spine? What is the importance of Kyphosis? When is a collapsed vertebra a fracture? These are all questions for ISCD 2012.
The International Society for Clinical Densitometry meets this week at the 2012 annual meeting. As a society, we began by studying DXA as a tool to identify individuals at increased Risk of Fracture. We now realize that DXA and BMD are only part of the analysis. FRAX has been a major step forward. We will be sharing our observations and advancing our collective knowledge.