Osteoporosis risk real for female athletes

Evidence suggests it can hit elite and amateur athletes alike.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. March 6, 2006.

Elizabeth Joy, MD, a family physician in Salt Lake City, has often had to deliver bad news to 20-something females with long athletic histories. After years of hard training and irregular menstrual cycles, some have the bones of old women.

"It's been very hard to tell them that they have the bone mineral density of 60-year-olds because they were told that not having menstrual periods was normal," said Dr. Joy, an associate professor in the Dept. of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Utah. "And the bone loss to some degree is irreversible."

The fact that her experiences are not isolated has led physicians and official sports bodies to increasingly recognize that, although sports participation is vital for women, it can also be detrimental and lead to the "female triad" of eating disorders, dysmenorrhea and osteoporosis.

The International Olympic Committee Medical Commission issued its first related position statement in November 2005 terming this condition a serious problem and recommending ways that physicians and other professionals can handle it. On the heels of this statement, a paper was published in the February International Journal of Eating Disorders mapping out how the IOC statement could be used by physicians.

"You have to ask the right questions because we're more concerned about [an athlete's] health than their athletic performance," said Ron A. Thompson, PhD, one of the paper's authors and a member of the panel that wrote the IOC directive.