Bone Mineral Density Testing And Bone Scan Results
- Focus on fitness. Exercise at least 30 minutes, three times a week. Weight-bearing exercise is the most helpful for your bones.
- Consider your emotional foundation. Stress, worry, and anxiety produce high levels of cortisol, which is destructive to bone. Reducing stress levels through cognitive therapy or other methods can only benefit your bone health.
- Consider other bone health tests to get a more rounded perspective of your bone health. At our clinic we like to monitor a woman’s NTx test results, which is a blood or urine test that indicates the rate of bone breakdown by measuring a specific molecule released during bone resorption. We also measure a woman’s pH level, which can help determine whether her diet and lifestyle are placing an excessive burden on her bones’ reserves of alkalizing compounds.
We’ve had great success with this approach in helping women stabilize or increase their bone density, while also promoting healthy bone metabolism and self-repair.
As a last resort for extreme bone loss, there are the widely prescribed bone density drugs called bisphosphonates. Bisphosphonates (like Fosamax and Actonel) stop bone mineral breakdown, allowing minerals to accumulate in the bone, which leads to an increase in bone density. We don’t generally recommend them because halting bone breakdown means that old bone is no longer being replaced by new bone, so that the bone overall becomes more brittle and more likely to break.
In fact, within a year of use these drugs halt the action of bone-building cells — the opposite of what your bones need! Plus they come with a host of risks and side effects.
If a woman’s individual bone loss is severe enough to warrant a bisphosphonate drug, we recommend she use the drug for no more than one year, and correct the underlying cause of her bone loss in the meantime using the steps outlined above.
Weak bones don’t usually cause symptoms, and screening tests are among the few clues a woman has to know if her bones are healthy. But we want women to understand that bone density test results are most meaningful when part of an overall bone health picture. Most important, there’s a lot you can do to strengthen your bones, no matter what your current bone density.
[banner id=”osteoperosis-nutritional-system”]