U.S. Hispanic Women Face Osteoporosis "Epidemic"

Main Category: Bones / Orthopaedics
Article Date: 06 Jun 2008 - 2:00 PDT

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Osteoporosis is a disease that can be crippling, leaving bones brittle, weak and easily broken. There are already some 8 million women in the U.S. who suffer from osteoporosis* and experts say that number could soon skyrocket.

She may not quite understand the language yet, or the technology behind the test, but Sandra Ramos knows the importance of a simple heel scan.

"I'm told with time, my bones can get weaker," says Ramos.

If they are, a quick 5 minute heel scan can tell her. In many ways, Sandra is lucky. She never heard much about osteoporosis in her native Mexico, and experts fear millions more Hispanic women will not hear enough about it after settling in this country - leading to a serious health issue in the near future.

"We are facing, as a country I think, a potential epidemic for osteoporosis if we don't do something proactively," says Kevin Evans, PhD at Ohio State University Medical Center.

That's just what Dr. Evans is doing. He's conducting studies on hundreds of Hispanic women to see how brittle their bones might be. Treating broken bones in Hispanics due to osteoporosis already costs more than 750 million dollars a year in the U.S.* That number is expected to skyrocket to more than 2 billion dollars* unless programs like these can get the word out early about prevention.

"We really want to see if we can do something to affect them building bone mass. Osteoporosis is considered a disease classically for people over the age of 50 or 60. We want to do something before they get there," says Evans.

He says Hispanic women are rarely included in studies looking at osteoporosis. By doing more heel scans, that might change, and so might their risk of falling to this crippling disease. Evans says another challenge is to get more calcium products into the Hispanic diet. Things like milk and broccoli have high calcium levels, but they are not staples in the diets of some Hispanics.

*Osteoporosis Facts, National Osteoporosis Foundation, retrieved from http://www.nof.org/osteoporosis/diseasefacts.htm, May 2008

Ohio State University Medical Center

Located in Columbus, Ohio, The Ohio State University Medical Center is one of the largest and most diverse academic medical centers in the country and the only academic medical center in central Ohio.

State University Medical Center