Disease Isn’t Limited to Just White Women

The National Osteoporosis Risk Assessment study hopes to screen 200,000 postmenopausal American women who have no history of osteoporosis to better understand their risk for the disease. So far, an analysis of 76,000 bone scans has undermined the long-held notion that white women are at the highest risk for thinning bones.

Results from 48,000 women whose bone density was measured at their heels revealed:

* Of the 900 Asian women studied, 65.1% had low bone mass, including the 8.2% who had osteoporosis.

* Native American women followed with a 58.9% rate of low bone mass among the 421 tested, including 9.5% with the disease.

* Latinas were expected to be at least at risk but turned out to be among those at highest risk--with 55.5% of 1,628 women tested having low bone mass, including the 4.3% who had outright osteoporosis.

* White women had a 50.5% rate of low bone mass among the 43,626 tested, and 5.2% of them were osteoporotic.

* African-American women, as expected, posted the lowest rate, with 38% of the 1,695 tested having low bone mass and 4% having the disease.

“Just as Caucasian patients had lower and lower bone densities as they aged, this was true for others as well,” said Dr. Ethel Siris, medical director of the study. “This is stuff that has never been looked at in such long, large populations before. These were very important findings in huge populations of women. We found age and years postmenopause correlated with lowest bone density.”

Results for an additional 28,000 women whose bone mass was measured at the forearm won’t be released until April, according to Merck & Co., which is funding and managing the study in collaboration with the International Society for Clinical Densitometry. Results from the forearm tests follow the same general trends as the heel tests, although Latinas had lower bone mass in the forearm than Asians, a Merck spokeswoman said.

Merck officials caution that there is a difference between finding low bone mass and determining the actual risk of fracture. Only now are number-crunchers beginning the analyses needed to understand fracture risks in ethnic groups. Just because an Asian woman has lower bone mass than a white woman doesn’t mean she necessarily has a higher risk of fracture, because other factors such as weight, can play a role. However, among Asian women, those with lower bone mass are at higher risk of fracture.