Celebrating World Osteoporosis Day 2020 The Asia Pacific Consortium on Osteoporosis (APCO) is delighted to be celebrating World Osteoporosis Day (WOD) today (Tuesday, October 20). WOD is an annual, campaign that was conceptualised in 1997 by the National Osteoporosis Society of the UK and later adopted by the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF). It is …
Osteoporosis and fragility fractures – a family affair Read More »
“Goal Directed Therapy” (GDT) is a patient care approach designed to improve patient outcomes, and is well established following its initial introduction in critical care. In areas such as rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, GDT is commonplace, with evidence to support its benefit. The question of how GDT can be applied in the management of the …
Goal Directed Therapy in osteoporosis: a target in sight or still a pipe-dream? Read More »
More than 300 genetic variants have been discovered to be associated with osteoporosis or fracture. The magnitude of effect of these variants on fracture risk is very modest. One may ask: how can doctors utilise genes for fracture risk assessment? Consider the following case: a 70 year old woman whose femoral neck BMD is 0.72 …
Breakable bones and genes – How can doctors utilise genes for fracture risk assessment? Read More »
In December 2012, Osteoporosis New Zealand (ONZ) published BoneCare 2020 which called for implementation of a systematic approach to hip fracture care and prevention for New Zealand. This included establishing a national hip fracture registry to benchmark care against quality standards and nationwide implementation of Fracture Liaison Services (FLS), to ensure all people who sustain …
Innovative approaches to driving public awareness of bone health Read More »
Osteopenia is not a disease. It is a category of bone density – between 1 and 2.5 standard deviations below the mean value in the young normal population. Thus, one in six healthy young individuals have a bone density in this range, as do the majority of women over the age of 60 years. The …
Osteopenia – To treat or not to treat. That is the question Read More »
Since the term was coined by John McCarthy in 1956, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the ability of machines to emulate human cognition in the analysis, interpretation, and comprehension of complicated data, has come a long way. Earlier, in 1950, Alan Turing’s classic publication “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” had introduced the concept of what is now known as the …
Fixing a Fractured Future – Can Artificial Intelligence help? Read More »
The bone loss and increased bone fragility that results from specific, well-defined clinical disorders, and due to certain medications, is termed secondary osteoporosis. Pre- and post-menopausal women, as well as men, may develop secondary osteoporosis. Up to 45% of post-menopausal women, and 60-65% of men are found to have an underlying contributor to their osteoporosis …
Not just garden-variety osteoporosis: secondary osteoporosis and its management Read More »
A recent IOF-ISCD global survey carried out at the Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit (MRC LEU, University of Southampton) in collaboration with the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) and the International Society for Clinical Densitometry (ISCD), has revealed a worrying lack of quality assurance and reporting procedures in DXA services worldwide. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) …
DXA scanning facility quality standards – Are we falling woefully short? Read More »
Osteoporosis is a silent and chronic disease. Many patients are unaware that they have the disease until they sustain a fracture. Nurses can be at the front line in helping to manage osteoporosis. Asian cultural norms favour an environment where the dependent relationship between parents and their children change inversely as persons get older, with …
Is obesity protective for fragility fractures due to osteoporosis? The answer, although complex, is likely to be no. While obesity defined by body mass index (BMI) is generally associated with higher areal bone mineral density (BMD) and a lower fracture risk, fracture risk at specific skeletal sites is actually increased. For example, the Global Longitudinal …
