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Osteoporosis - The Silent Thief
A day doesn’t go by that I don’t see Valerie Bertinelli or Sally Fields on TV advertising Boniva® or some other treatment for osteoporosis. This condition is a major health problem in older people, especially women, who often sustain fractures as a result of falls. There are over 1.5 million fractures a year attributed to osteoporosis in the US each year.1
Normally, the bony skeleton is maintained by continual renewal called remodeling, removing old bone and replacing it with new bone.1 The entire skeleton is replaced every seven years. To do this, our cells require calcium, and to absorb calcium from our diet, we also require vitamin D, which our bodies can manufacture in the skin, with exposure to sunlight.
In osteoporosis which means “porous bone,” bones are peppered with millions of microscopic holes, or pores, the result of continual bone resorption over time. (Resorption is the process in which bone is broken down and calcium is released into the blood.) The normal balance between bone resorption and new bone creation is lost, with bone loss overwhelming the formation of new bone.1 This results in a net loss of bone volume and strength and bones that are brittle.
The bone that remains is normal bone; there’s just less of it. Think of Swiss cheese: the cheese itself is normal, but it’s shot throughout with lots of holes. Really advanced osteoporosis would be analogous to lacy Swiss cheese.
