May is Osteoporosis Awareness And Prevention Month

Osteoporosis is often called a silent disease because it progresses without symptoms until you suffer a fracture. It is crucial to understand this disease and learn what you can do to prevent it from occurring or progressing. Worldwide, one in three women and one in five men over the age of fifty will suffer a broken bone due to osteoporosis. In women over 45, fractures due to osteoporosis result in more days spent in hospital than many other diseases, including diabetes, heart attack and breast cancer. 

Osteoporosis means porous bone, Bone tissue can appear like a sponge with little holes dotted all over. When someone has osteoporosis those holes get bigger because there is a smaller amount of bone tissue. Osteoporosis occurs due to our body loosing too much bone tissue, not creating enough bone tissue, or both. There can be many causes including side effects from medication or as a result of a different disease. The most common cause is related to inactivity. 

Our bodies are really cool in how they function and respond to what we do them. When it comes to bone, it responds and adapts based on what we do to it. When we are active our bodies will work to ensure our bones stay strong enough in response to the load we place on it. When we are inactive, we are not placing a great strain or load on our bones so our bodies will respond by not making or keeping our bones strong. Just like our muscles, if we use our muscles our bodies respond and adapt to that use by making them stronger but if we don't use our muscles they weaken. If a person is inactive and you are taking a steroid to treat a different condition, that can greatly accelerate the bone loss. 

The question, then, is what do we do to prevent bone loss or treat Osteoporosis? The first thing is we need to make sure we are feeding ourselves the nutrients which help keep bones strong. Those include calcium, magnesium, Vitamin D, zinc, and protein. I will get into detail on this in another post. If we are deficient in these nutrients, our bodies cannot build stronger bones regardless the amount of activity we do. The second thing is we have to put a load on our bones, which means strength training, weight lifting or some kind of progressive resistance exercise. Walking, swimming, running, playing basketball, or even pickle ball, just are not intense enough to stimulate bone growth. 

What do you do if you already have osteoporosis and are afraid of strength training because you do not want to fracture a bone. OR what do you do if you just have no experience in weight lifting but know you need to perform some resistance exercise?  There are a few options that exist which has some some effect in the literature in building bone tissue as measured on DEXA scans. Those include exercise on a vibrating platform and osteogenic loading exercise. There is a growing body of evidence in the medical literature that shows an increase in bone density by using whole body vibration platforms, alone. What is unclear is the time needed to see a measurable improvement. Additionally isometric and eccentric exercise has been noted to be more efficient at safely placing significant loading on muscle and bone tissue resulting in improvements in strength. 

In our practice we offer a program of care that incorporates, whole body vibration exercises along with isometric and eccentric resistance training. We have had this program for over ten years now and have had several cases of improved bone density as measured on DEXA scans. We have also have had countless people improve their daily life because this program improve their strength which makes their life easier and they have less pain. If you browse over to our BStrong4Life sections you can read about what we offer. You can also schedule an appointment to meet with us and discuss if this program is right for you. If you would rather you can call us at 630-232-6616 as well. 

There are a lot of resources on the internet for information regarding Osteoporosis, for this post the majority of my information and data comes from the Bone Health & Osteoporosis Foundation or the International Osteoporosis Foundation. Many of the images in today's post come from the media kit produced by the BH&O Foundation.