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Osteoporosis
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Osteoporosis Facts and Statistics The body is constantly at work breaking down and rebuilding the bones. Specialized bone cells called osteoblasts pull calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus from the blood to build bone mass. Even with a healthy diet and regular exercise, at approximately 30 years the body will begin to lose more bone than it forms. Usually there are not any obvious symptoms of osteoporosis until a fracture occurs or a vertebrae collapses causing a loss of height and a hump in the back (dowager's hump).
Osteoporosis affects more than 20 million people in the U.S. and causes 1.5 million fractures each year. Two hundred and fifty thousand of those 1.5 million fractures are hip fractures and for 300,000 people (20% of fractures) it leads to death. Of the 1.2 million that do not die, 600,000 (40% of the fractures) will require long term nursing care because of complications. Osteoporosis is four times more common in women than in men, and the most common form of the disease is postmenopausal osteoporosis. Fortunately, osteoporosis is completely preventable and curable with the proper nutrition and exercise. Yes, you did read that right, it said "completely preventable and curable." For years it has been thought that loss of bone density and osteoporosis is an uncontrollable, inevitable, and irreversible part of getting old. This statistic has been based on an aging population that has done very little to stop osteoporosis from affecting them. Welcome to the new era of health alternatives. A time where the medical myths of yesteryear are being completely overturned. A time when people are defying the statistical averages by taking charge of their own health. Yes, aging will affect your bone density, but brittle shallow bones are not inevitable, uncontrollable, nor irreversible.
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Osteoporosis Diseases
Type I osteoporosis is caused by hormonal changes while Type II is caused by dietary deficiencies. Osteoporosis can also be caused by major surgery, corticosteroid drugs (anti-inflammatory drugs), liver cirrhosis, Crohn's inflammatory disease of the bowel, cystic fibrosis, and hormone deficiencies. Usually, osteoporosis is diagnosed by bone densitometry scans, and the goals in treatment are to preserve the remaining mass and the basic structure of the bone and try to repair and reconstruct damaged areas of the bone.
This means that one out of two women over the age of 50 will have an osteoporosis-related fracture in their lifetime. Osteoporosis is less common in men with one in eight men suffering from an osteoporosis-related fracture in their lifetime. Aging men suffer a decrease in testosterone and since testosterone is converted into estrogen this loss of testosterone causes similar problems for men as estrogen does for women. According to Dr. Steven E. Whiting in his article Osteoporosis: A Factor in Aging, the following are also risk factors for osteoporosis (Click Here for full text):
Other risk factors include being white or Asian, being lean, being inactive (regular exercise is proven to strengthen the bones), never being pregnant, having a gastric or small-bowel resection or long-term glucocorticosteroid therapy, smoking and/or heavy alcohol use, suffering from hyperthyroidism and hyperparathyroidism, and the long-term use of anticonvulsants.
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Osteoporosis Nutritional Support Strategies
Supplementation with calcium, vitamins C, D, E, and K as well as careful regulation of the amount of magnesium, phosphorus, silicon, boron, zinc, manganese, and copper in the diet is important in preventing and treating osteoporosis. We recommend a multi-vitamin/mineral intake like that contained in our Nutrition and Antioxidant Kit plus an increase in calcium by taking BioCalcium a multi-faceted calcium supplement. Our Osteoporosis Self-management Program will give you additional nutrient and lifestyle. We also include the Center for Disease Control Framework for Osteoporosis Prevention and Control to help you understand on a large scale what the government is doing.
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Postmenopausal women are at a high risk for developing osteoporosis, since once they hit menopause their bodies stop producing estrogen (one of the hormones that regulates bone remodeling). With the estrogen gone, women begin to lose bone at a rate of two to five percent per year during the first five to seven years after menopause.