Molly Giles was standing in her kitchen one spring night in 2019, musing about whether to do the dishes or leave them until the morning, when a bone in her left leg snapped and she crashed to the ground, breaking her hip.
Giles, now 81, had “bones like meringue,” her doctor rather glibly later told her. A scan several years earlier had revealed, a precursor to the “silent” disease of bone density loss known as osteoporosis. But neither Giles nor her doctors followed up, and her bones grew increasingly weak until her femur “melted,” as she later described it.
Many factors contribute to the low rates of testing, not least of which is garden-variety denial of aging. “For many patients, there’s a bit of ‘That’s not me,’” Singer says. “Osteoporosis is your grandmother’s disease, and I’m not that frail old lady.”up to seven years after menopause, when bone-protecting estrogen levels decline. Women also suffer more than 70 percent of the related fractures.Preventing osteoporosis should begin many years before such problems might occur, experts say.
More commonly, for more than two decades, doctors have prescribed a class of drugs called bisphosphonates, with brand names that include Fosamax, Boniva and Reclast. Bisphosphonates and denosumab , a monoclonal antibody, are known as “antiresorptives” because they target bone cells that break down and reabsorb bone tissue. Some can be taken orally every day, every week or every month; others are given intravenously, every three months.
But bone-building drugs are expensive, and some insurance plans won’t reimburse unless a patient has already tried other medications. At that point, however, the bisphosphonates may at least temporarilyScientists around the world are working on new medications and treatment approaches for osteoporosis. Some are studying stem-cell therapies that may hasten repair of fractures. Others are looking into drugs that may clear outSlowing U.S.