Sunday, February 21, 2010
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Diagnosing osteoporosis?
Bone loss is diagnosed with a DXA scan. There are also important blood and urine tests that can be done to evaluate your calcium status. Your doctor may want to see if you are absorbing your calc...
Dear Pam,
This is one of the most well informed articles which I have ever read on this topic. It says a lot of things in short and tells us what to be careful about and what to watch out for! Also the para on spinal fractures is interesting and frightening at the same time! Imagine a fracture without us being aware of it.
There is one other feature of osteoporosis which you may wish to comment on -- and that is detecting osteoporosis from a dental examination. They say that dental X Rays can tell us a lot about the condition of our bones. There has also been talk of the hair telling us of our calcium status. There is also the relationship between osteoporosis and heart disease -- all those with brittle bones end up getting heart disease. The theory is that the calcium loss from the bones builds up in the arteries. How many people with osteoporosis have concurrent heart disease is another area which you might wish to comment upon.
Thanking you for another enlightening post that will keep us thinking for a long time.
Yours,
Priya
Hi Priya, thanks for joining us and good to hear from you. Thanks for your kinds words about my Sharepost.
Yes the idea of having a compression fracture and not knowing it, is alarming, that's why having a VFA is very important. I imagine they might not have that test where you live, but a regular spinal x-ray will show these as well. Just to clarify, there are some spinal fractures that can certainly be felt (pain wise), but micro fractures seen in compression fractures are often not felt at all or have little pain. You've probably talked to people who found out they had a compression fracture from an x-ray years after it happened. Generally when this happens it heals on it's own, and the current thinking is to just let them do that and not repair them. Of course this would depend on the extent of the fracture and if it is involving other areas of the spine, like nerves, spinal canal etc. Check the link on Compression Fractures, Silent Fracture screening and Fragility Fractures which will explain all of these more fully.
With a compression fracture you can loose some height, so if you don't have pain but have lost height or notice a rounding of the belly you could have a silent thoracic compression fracture. Nowadays they just usually let these heal on their own "unless" they are causing pain or immobility.
We will be discussing heart disease and osteoporosis soon.
Good luck...
Dear Pam,
Thanks for clarifying the spinal fracture further. I will test my height regulary!! I am looking forward to your posts on heart disease and osteoporosis and the involvement of calcium and Vit D. Most people these days are taking low doses of calcium to the tune of 600 to 300 mg daily to ward off its ill effects on calcification of the arteries. This can severely compromise their osteoporosis demands of calcium of 1200 mg daily. So how are we going to reconcile the two? The one thing that speaks of low doses of calcium is the fact that in countries where calcium is low there are virtually no cases of osteopososis, whereas in the advanced countries like the USA where there is no dearth of calcium, osteoporosis is endemic. Please explain these contradictions also in your new post, as we are all looking forward to it here in India. I explain your share posts in the Hindi language to those who cannot read English.
Best wishes and thanks,
Yours,
Priya