People can have osteoporosis for years and year without knowing what’s happening to their bones because there are really no symptoms for the disorder until the person starts experiences broken bones or even just one broken bone in a situation where a bone normally wouldn’t break – these are called minimal trauma fractures.
Once an osteoporosis patient starts experiencing fractures, the pain that goes along with them is quite considerable. Furthermore, hip fractures due to osteoporosis are likely to have great difficulty healing because of the state of the bones’ health and many times people who suffer hip fractures will need assistance (possibly even in a nursing home setting).
There are many ways to treat osteoporosis. The first way is to increase calcium intake. This needs to be accompanied by vitamin D, which helps the absorption of calcium by the body.
One way that physicians used to treat osteoporosis was through hormone replacement therapy (generally during menopause), which had been shown to reduce the amount of bone loss. It can also increase bone density and help prevent bone fractures. This hormone replacement therapy came in the form of estrogen (as a tablet or skin patch) or in the form of an estrogen-progesterone pill or patch. It was found that long-term use of this therapy, however, led to increased risks for heart attacks, stroke and breast cancer so it’s now mostly used simply for short-term treatment for hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms.
There are anabolic steroids that have been approved for treatment of osteoporosis as well. They have been shown to stimulate new bone formation as well as increasing the enhancement of calcium absorption. Because of their side effects of increasing male gender characteristics, They are not deemed to be the best treatment for all osteoporosis patients and generally are used for the very elderly who have severe osteoporosis. Sources: |
