Normal hip spine xrays
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The socio-economic demand for the management of osteoporotic patients will also increase in the next years: it would be both useful and necessary to adopt a preventive approach to the problem in postmenopausal women with the aim to stop or at least slow down the disease progression. As a consequence, with the gradual increase in life expectancy in developed countries, osteoporosis and consequent fragility fractures represent a major health problem in elderly women (older than 50 years) which will become a predominant portion in the next decades. įractures resulting from osteoporosis lead to high rates of morbidity and mortality, reduce quality of life and are responsible for a sharp increase in healthcare costs. Nevertheless, about 75% of these people represent undiagnosed cases and do not receive appropriate treatment.Īccording to the World Health Organization (WHO), osteoporosis is “a systemic skeletal disease characterized by low bone mass and microarchitectural deterioration of bone tissue with a consequent increase in bone fragility and susceptibility to fracture”. In recent years the prevalence and the awareness of osteoporosis are increasing and it has been estimated that 200 millions of individuals suffer from osteoporosis worldwide. Here we illustrate the state of art in the early diagnosis of this “silent disease” and show up recent advances for its prevention and improved management through early diagnosis. However, the US assessment of osteoporosis is currently used only as a pre-screening tool, requiring a subsequent diagnosis confirmation by means of a DXA evaluation. Furthermore, the usefulness of QUS techniques in fracture risk prediction has been proven and, with the last developments, they are also becoming a more and more reliable approach for assessing bone quality. This has resulted in an increasing interest in developing reliable pre-screening tools for osteoporosis such as quantitative ultrasound (QUS) scanners, which do not involve ionizing radiation exposure and represent a cheaper solution exploiting portable and widely available devices. Unfortunately, as other X-ray based techniques, DXA has specific limitations ( e.g., use of ionizing radiation, large size of the equipment, high costs, limited availability) that hinder its application for population screenings and primary care diagnosis. Among the most commonly used techniques, dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is considered the current “gold standard” for osteoporosis diagnosis and fracture risk prediction. All X-ray based methods provide a measure of bone mineral density (BMD), but it has been demonstrated that other structural aspects of the bone are important in determining fracture risk, such as mechanical features and elastic properties, which cannot be assessed using densitometric techniques. Current clinically-available diagnostic methods are mainly based on the use of either X-rays or ultrasound (US). Effective prevention and management of osteoporosis would require suitable methods for population screenings and early diagnosis.