Osteoporosis Archive

Don't ignore back pain, height loss, or osteoporosis. They could be signs of a compression fracture.

You didn't fall, and you didn't do anything strenuous. So it may come as a surprise when the bad back pain you've been experiencing turns out to be one or more broken bones in your back. "A common story is that someone bends down to put something in the dishwasher or steps off a curb a little hard and puts additional load on their spine. The weakened bone is not adequate to take that load, and it collapses," says Dr. Julia Charles, a rheumatologist and bone cell researcher at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.

What weakens the spine?

Your spine contains about 30 bones called vertebrae, stacked on top of each other like a roll of quarters. Each vertebra consists of an external bone surface (like plaster), and an inside filled with a honeycomb of support rods called trabeculae.

Osteoporosis affects 10 million people in the United States, the majority of them women. Romosozumab is a new type of medication for treating osteoporosis that offers another treatment option for some women after menopause.

A drug holiday is one recommendation to reduce the risk of a rare bone condition that affects the jaw.

A dentist refers a woman to an oral surgeon because she needs a tooth pulled. But upon reviewing her chart, the oral surgeon turns her away.

The reason? She's taking a common medication to treat her osteoporosis, a condition that causes bones to become thin, brittle, and prone to fracture.

The best prevention for bone-thinning osteoporosis begins early — during the first two decades of life, when you can most influence your peak bone mass by getting enough calcium and vitamin D and doing bone-strengthening exercise. If you are over age 20, there's no need to be discouraged. It's never too late to adopt bone-preserving habits.

If you are a man younger than 65 or a premenopausal woman, these five strategies can help you shore up bone strength as a hedge against developing osteoporosis.

Ask the doctors

Q. Is there any way to tell if you are getting osteoporosis? Are there symptoms?

A. Osteoporosis is a disease that causes your bones to become weak and brittle and more likely to break. Unfortunately, you probably won't have any symptoms until the disease is advanced or you actually experience a fracture. However, there are two visible clues of osteoporosis: changes in your posture (such as a hunched-over appearance) and loss of height. Both of these changes may be caused when your spine becomes curved or compressed from weakness or tiny fractures (called compression fractures) in your vertebrae, the small bones that make up your spine.

Those extra inches around the middle may signal increased fat around abdominal organs and rising health risks.

It's a rare woman over age 50 who has the same waist measurement she had as a teenager. But in the past decade or so, women's waistlines have been expanding regardless of age. A 2014 report from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that from 1999 to 2012, the average body mass index (BMI) for women age 20 or older held steady. But during the same period, the average female waistline grew slowly and steadily, from 36.2 inches to 37.8 inches. Researchers are still searching for an explanation for this phenomenon, but they do know one thing: increasing waistlines are linked to greater risks for heart disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis.

What's in a waistline?

Regardless of whether your weight has changed over the years, your height is likely to have decreased, the result of declining volume in the intervertebral discs of the spine. As your torso shortens, your abdominal organs have less vertical space to inhabit, so they move horizontally. If you haven't gained weight, an increase of an inch or two around the waist may simply reflect lost height.

Denosumab (Prolia) is recommended for people at high risk for fractures for whom other bone-loss treatments were ineffective or had intolerable side effects.

The disease strikes more women, but men are also at risk.

Osteoporosis is often considered a woman's disease, but men also need to be concerned about this bone-weakening condition. About 2 million men have osteoporosis and another 12 million are at high risk, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation.

In fact, older men have a greater risk for an osteoporosis-related fracture than for getting prostate cancer, and about one in four men older than 50 will break a bone because of osteoporosis during his lifetime.