It's time today to bone up on a key health issue: osteoporosis, a potential killer that starts early in life but that is largely preventable.
The spur for this item is a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that evaluated the bone status of a staggering 200,000 post-menopausal women.
How did the researchers manage to examine so many women?
Easy - they set up their equipment in shopping malls and outside movie theatres showing "chick flicks".
Just kidding, of course. These women were actually seen in a wide variety of locations because the researchers used equipment that measures the density of "peripheral" bones such as the heel, and which is more portable than standard "bone density machines" that focus on larger bones such as the hip.
The researchers found that an amazing 40 % of post-menopausal women have "low" bone density, and over 7 % have established osteoporosis.
Even worse, by the time they were assessed, 11 % of the women had suffered some type of fracture, yet they had not been put on appropriate therapy to lessen the risk of future fractures.
This study should act as a wake-up call to everyone to get serious about bone health: not only doctors and women of all ages, but men, too, since a recent Canadian study found that osteoporosis may be much more common in men than previously believed.
The reason we need to pay more attention to this condition is that fractures, which get more common with age - about 40 % of women break a bone at one point in their lives, particularly in the hip, the vertebra, and the wrist - not only lead to pain and disability, they kill lots of people, too - about 25 % of hip fractures lead to death.
So you want to keep your bones strong, boys and girls, and although genetics plays a role in osteoporosis (the risk is higher in some families, as well as Asians and Caucasians), the good news is that there is much you can do.
First, for parents, get your kids on a bone health regime as early as possible (although I don't want to discourage any geezers reading this because it's probably never too late to make appropriate changes). But the earlier the better, because like certain other body parts, bones, too, grow bigger until early adulthood, and it's very important to lay down as much early bone as possible - the more bone laid down and the better it's maintained through middle age and beyond, the more bone you can afford to lose as you reach dowager status.
And what do you have to do? Simple - clean up your acts.
First, eat better focusing on more calcium-rich dairy products - yes, that means drinking more milk instead of pop.
Give up smoking, and (perhaps) limit your caffeine intake, too.
And probably the hardest, but for me, the most important thing - get off your ample butts. Weight-bearing exercise is crucial for adequate bone strength. And it doesn't have to be complicated exercise - one study, for example, found that jumping up and down fifty times a day is a good way to maintain bone strength, advice that clearly should be used with caution by anyone living in a third floor condo.http://chealth.canoe.ca/channel_section_details.asp?text_id=2010&channel_id=10&relation_id=3901
