Research Suggests Osteoporosis Screening Guidelines Miss Many Younger Post-Menopausal Women
All women age 65 and older must be tested and treated for low bone mineral density to reduce the risk of bone fractures and the complications arising from them, the United States Preventive Services Task force (USPSTF) recommends.
The task force also recommends that postmenopausal women aged 50 to 64, get bone mineral density screenings if their 10-year probability of suffering a hip, vertebral, humerus or wrist fracture is 9.3 percent or greater, based on the Fracture Risk Assessment Tool.
A new UCLA-led study published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, however, finds that the USPSTF strategy predicted only slightly more than one fourth of the women who went on to experience major osteoporotic fractures within 10 years. The study also found that two older osteoporosis risk-assessment tools were not much better.
The Osteoporosis Self-Assessment Tool (OST) is based on a person's weight and age, and the Simple Calculated Osteoporosis Risk Estimation Tool (SCORE), uses race, rheumatoid arthritis, history of non-traumatic fracture, age, prior estrogen therapy and weight.
"If we want to prevent fractures, we need tools that help us accurately predict who will suffer these osteoporotic injuries so that we can target these at-risk people for preventive measures," said Dr. Carolyn Crandall, professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and the study's primary investigator. "Our results suggest that our current guidelines for screening in younger post-menopausal women do not accurately identify who will suffer a fracture."
The researchers used data from the Women's Health Initiative, which collected details about fractures during 10 years' time and information about osteoporosis risk factors from 62,492 postmenopausal women in the United States from ages 50 to 64. Of the women studied, 85 percent were white, 9 percent were black, and 4 percent were Hispanic. The average age was 57.9.
The study found that overall the USPSTF strategy captured only 25.8 percent of the women who suffered fractures within 10 years, SCORE captured 38.6 percent and OST caught 39.8 percent.
These were the findings for the percentage of women whose fractures were predicted using each risk-assessment tool for three age groups: