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Spine Fractures & Osteoporosis, Health Channel

Osteoporosis is a disease that affects over 200 million people worldwide. Dr. Georgiy Brusovanik, Spine Surgeon with Baptist Health South Florida, says the bone isn’t homogeneous and explains how osteoporosis appears when the wall of bone becomes thinner, and puts the patient at risk for suffering compression fractures.

Transcript

Spine Fractures & Osteoporosis, Health Channel

Let’s go in more detail about some of the risks of compression fractures and a big one is osteoporosis which is a disease that affects over 200 million people worldwide now explain to us a little bit about osteoporosis and I imagine this is one of those causes for the compression fractures as well with the brittle bones correct absolutely okay so a bone isn’t homogeneous there are two parts to the bone there’s the outer wall which is the cortex and that’s usually real strong and that provides you more stability and then there’s the inner part which is spongy bone and that really doesn’t provide much stability the inner part of the bone actually is where we have most of our bone marrow so that’s where the red blood cells are made of our blood with osteoporosis the outer wall of bone becomes thinner and the inner the spongy part becomes wider and more expands out therefore even though bones look the same if you were to take an x-ray you could really see that there’s a difference with time right so osteoporosis causes weakening of all our bones but particularly with the vertebra with spinal bones because there is so much of that inner spongy bone that’s surrounded by the cortical bone so that thinning of the bone then that sort of causes that degenerative loss of density you got it and then sometimes even with something as minor as a cough or a sneeze wow I just took a wrong step and all of a sudden the bone just kind of gives way right the inner part the spongy bone kind of collapses the cortex the outer wall breaks and then the ball kind of twinges down accordions down that’s compression fractures you

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