Standing on solid bone

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Last year, as a favor to a friend, forty-two-year-old Cindy Murphy participated in a benefit walk for osteoporosis. At the walk, she got a free ultrasound scan of the bone in her heel. When the results revealed that Murphy had the bone density of a much older woman and needed to see a doctor, though, she laughed.

“I thought, ‘How accurate can those machines be?’ ” she recalls.

But shortly afterward, Murphy wasn’t laughing. Her doctor encouraged her to have a complete physical along with her Pap test—a good idea for any woman over forty. During that physical, nurses discovered Murphy had lost nearly an inch of height. Height loss is a key marker symptom for osteoporosis, a disorder that results in increasingly brittle and breakable bones.

Doctors performed a computerized axial tomography (CAT) scan on Murphy’s spine. That test showed even less bone density than the heel scan. Suddenly, doctors were telling her she had a disease that she equated with old age and fragility, with inevitable decline.

Osteoporosis—literally, “porous bone,” —is a crippling disease because porous bones break more easily and repair themselves more slowly. Bones lose density slowly, day after day and year after year. But without the medical tests that “see” into bones, there’s no way to tell that it’s happening.

Weak bones in the spine can fracture without a fall, resulting in chronic back pain, poor posture, or a loss of height. Falls that wouldn’t harm someone with good bone density can result in fractures of the wrist or hip, both of which can be extremely painful. Hip fractures can be debilitating.

Ten million Americans have osteoporosis, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation. Another 18 million have low bone density, which places them at increased risk of developing osteoporosis. The condition affects men as well as wo­men, although not as many. The foundation estimates that one in every two women and one in every eight men who are over age fifty now will experience an osteoporosis-­related fracture in their lifetime.

The bone-density bank account

Women in Murphy’s age group usually don’t worry about their bone density. But osteoporosis can strike at any age. In otherwise healthy people, it usually doesn’t turn up until menopause in women or about age seventy in men. Among the risk factors unrelated to menopause are having a small or thin frame, sedentary lifestyle, eating disorders or “yo-yo” dieting, use of corticosteroids and anticonvulsants, smoking, absent menstrual periods, and low calcium intake.

Doctors have become concerned about poor bone density in premenopausal wo­men because of the condition’s tendency to be symptomless until bones are already weakened. By that time, it can be too late to make radical improvements in bone density. Osteoporosis is a disease that is much easier to prevent than it is to treat. For the best results, prevention starts in the teen years.