Osteoporosis often is called the Rottweiler disease, because it chews up your bones fast. And it’s sneaky. You won’t have a clue that your bones have been quietly getting brittle until you trip over the dog’s water bowl and break your wrist or fracture your hip.
Getting a clue early enough to do something about it is the whole point of having something called a bone mineral density test: It checks out the sturdiness of your skeleton. Who should have one of these and when? Age, gender, family and “it depends” are parts of the answer. (Aren’t they always?)
If bones that snap like toothpicks run in your family (or if you’re underweight or overdo alcohol), you should get your skeleton scanned by age 50 or earlier. If not, docs urge women to have the test around menopause, and definitely by 65. Men should get it by then, too; osteoporosis doesn’t know from sexual discrimination.
No worries about the process. As medical tests go, this one’s a gem: It’s fast, painless, safe and doesn’t cost the moon. Figure about 15 minutes for a DXA scan of your hip and spine (DXA stands for dual energy X-ray absorptiometry, if you like to know these things). DXA scans are the gold standard for assessing your bones’ mineral content (that is, their strength). If your insurance doesn’t cover DXA, it will run about $200.
And there’s a new way for you to use the test: Once you have your results, there’s a free, simple online tool that can help keep an eye on your bones. It’s especially useful if your mineral density turns out to be borderline (a condition known as osteopenia). The online tool is named FRAX, for fracture risk assessment. It was developed by the World Health Organization and last fall it became available to all DXA testers. Now that it’s online, anyone can use it. (Just type FRAX into any search engine, like Google or Bing, to find one of the many sites that now offer this calculator.)
Here’s how the tool works: FRAX combines your DXA results with a brief questionnaire about your age, sex and a few “it depends” factors (no surprise). Seconds after you type in your answers, you’ll know your odds of breaking a bone during the next 10 years. That will help you and your doc decide whether you might need bone-building drugs. That’s a good bet if FRAX says your risk of a hip fracture within 10 years is greater than 3 percent.
But if your bones turn out to be stronger than a big-rig chassis, make sure you keep them that way. Our recipe is pretty simple: Take 600 mg of calcium, 200 mg of magnesium and 600 IU of vitamin D-3 twice a day. Then do resistance training twice a week.
What do we mean by “resistance training”? Easy. Any kind of exercise that involves pushing and pulling against some kind of weight or resistance. Could be lifting dumbbells, or using an exercise machine, working with those long, stretchy exercise tubes or bands, or just lifting and lowering your own body weight (what you do if you do push-ups and squats).
For reasons that aren’t totally clear to anyone (and that includes bone experts), your bones need a certain amount of resistance training to stay dense and strong. But a “certain amount” is surprisingly small: Just do two 15- or 20-minute sessions a week. (If you’ve never done anything like this, try our “YOU: On a Diet Beginner Workout” at RealAge.com.)
And one more thing: You’re going to get a huge bonus out of this. Not only will your bones be stronger, but your body will be firmer and slimmer, your joints more flexible and your pants a little looser. The only thing you’re likely to miss out on is a fracture in your future.
The YOU Docs, Mehmet Oz and Mike Roizen, are authors of “YOU: On a Diet.” Want more? See “The Dr. Oz Show” on TV (check local listings). To submit questions, visit realage.com.
