Kind of relaxing, actually, to put your feet up.

Later, you’ll get your DEXA results, probably at the follow-up visit with your physician. There’ll be a picture of your hip and spine, lots of numbers, and a graph showing you your bone density compared to that of others your age/sex.

The main thing you’ll be discussing is your T-score. This is a number that compares your bones to a healthy young adult of the same sex, and then gives you a score. Zero is the healthy young adult score. For post-menopausal women, anything above –1 is considered normal. From –1.0 to –2.5, you’ve got osteopenia. Below –2.5, you’ve got osteoporosis. 

Here's the kind of chart you might go over with your doctor. There's a separate page for each scan you had: hip, spine, and wrist, if you had your wrist done.

Once you have the results of your first bone density test, it’s like having your first mammogram results: the doctor will use it as a baseline, to track whether/how fast your bones are thinning. Typically, the baseline test is followed by tests every other year. The tests may be done every year if there’s strong evidence your bones are thinning pretty quickly, and/or if you’re trying different things to stop osteopenia from turning into osteoporosis.

There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? A DEXA scan is a piece of cake compared to a mammogram; keep that in mind if you’ve got your first DEXA scheduled soon.