Is Back Pain a Sign Of Osteoporosis? |
Back pain, loss of height over time, stooped posture, and a bone fracture are some of the symptoms of osteoporosis. Dr. Ronald Tolchin, Medical Director of the Baptist Health Center for Spine Care, says as people stop walking and exercising there is more risk for osteoporosis to occur, which is when the bone loses calcium and minerals that make it strong.
He explains when you start developing osteoporosis, your posture changes and you get slumped. That puts strains on the ligaments around the spine, the small joints in the back and the discs. He points out as the bones start compressing down, people lose height.
Transcript
Explain to us what’s going on here and and when someone has osteoporosis what what are they experiencing in their bones so you see the brownish area in the top of the hip where the ball and socket is okay so that area in that bone area is a spongy type of bone and that starts demineralized as we talked about loses calcium and some of the minerals that make it strong and as people stop walking and they stop exercising there’s more risk for that to even occur and so what can happen is you can get a fracture in the neck of that bone and that’s one of the risk factors for osteoporosis when we do what’s called a bone density study we’re looking at that femur we’re looking at the neck of the femur and we’re looking at the mineralization of it and we’re comparing it to a young healthy person’s mineralization and then we can score people on that and say your risk of fractures is 20% or 50% or you have normal bone for example but we want to look at that risk factor if it gets too high then we want to put people in medication to either replace some of the calcium in the bone or stop that demonization process and slow it down there are various meds for that and they’re common symptoms for osteoporosis as well starting with back pain loss of height over time some of these you have mentioned so talk to us a little about these dr. Tolson so the back pain as I mentioned when you start developing osteoporosis your posture changes you get slumped over and so that puts strain on the ligaments around the spine it puts strain on the small joints in the back called facet joints it puts strain on the discs so that’s all reason to have back pain and then as those bones start compressing down if they do it subtly it’s not so painful like a compression fracture the last the last item on the list right but it may happen over time people say I’m shrinking and usually women will say I’ve lost height I’ve lost an inch or two and that’s because of the osteoporosis starting to shrink those bones and compress them right with time and then they have the back pain the stooped posture and ultimately can have a fracture if it’s better you
