M


itzi Moore squeezed her recent bone density


scan between a lunch date and a salon appointment, confident that she could accomplish everything with ease. Having done it twice in prior years, Moore knew the scan would be quick and painless. “It’s such an easy test; I barely notice I’m having it,” says Moore, an energetic dental assistant and retired flight attendant in Lighthouse Point, FL. In fact, it took only twenty minutes from the time she signed in to Boca Raton Regional Hospital, in South Florida, to when she left the building to style her hair. Bone experts wish more women would follow Moore’s


lead. Osteoporosis is a serious disease that is often overlooked by women at midlife, a time when it’s critical to pay attention. According to the US Preventive Services Task Force, as many as one in two postmenopausal women are at risk of fracturing a bone from osteoporosis. “Each year there are 2 million fractures in the US, and a lot of that is preventable,” says Ethel Siris, director of the Toni Stabile Osteoporosis Center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. That’s because osteoporosis, the condition in which bone thins and bone density lessens, making breaks more likely, is akin to high blood pressure or even early cancer—a silent disease whose damage could be limited if caught and treated early. The best way to see what’s going on inside those bones is with a scan, known as dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). Women and their primary care doctors don’t focus on bone


health the way they do heart health and cancer, Siris laments. “A conversation about osteoporosis is not typically brought up in a regular appointment, the way blood tests or mammograms are,” she says. The result: too few women who should regularly be tested are. Yet learning if you’re at increased risk and taking steps to minimize it can save your life: A major fracture in later life is serious enough that 24 percent of older people who break their hip die within a year, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation.


SPRING / SUMMER 2012 pause


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