Are Men Undertreated for Osteoporosis?

By Rob Goodier

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Men account for roughly one in five people with osteoporosis in Hungary, but doctors prescribe treatments to women 10 to 20 times more often than to men, and men are given a narrower range of treatments, a new study has found.

Those differences may mean that men are going undertreated or undiagnosed for osteoporosis, researchers suggest in Maturitas, online November 11.

"Osteoporosis is still often considered as a disease of elderly women only," lead author Andrea Bor, a resident in the clinical pharmacy faculty at the University of Szeged in Hungary, told Reuters Health by email. "Therefore the majority of health care professionals simply miss the opportunity to screen, identify and treat male patients."

To improve screening in men, Bor recommends that clinicians use the World Health Organization's online Fracture Risk Assessment (FRAX, https://www.shef.ac.uk/FRAX/).

"After detecting the patients at risk, daily exercise, vitamin D and calcium supplementation play the biggest role in fracture prevention in both men and women," Bor says.

A randomized trial published in 2011, however, showed that calcium and vitamin D supplements did not boost bone mineral density in replete men (https://bit.ly/1tjEyBc).

For their study, Bor and her colleagues mined a national Hungarian database for prescription information from 2007 to 2011. Among their findings, women were prescribed vitamin D and its analogues roughly 10 times more frequently than men, and women received bisphosphonate prescriptions roughly 20 times more often.

It is not clear how widespread the problem is beyond Hungary's borders, and further study is needed, the researchers say.

SOURCE: https://bit.ly/11jv1DG

Maturitas 2014.

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