Not just for women: Osteoporosis jumps gender gap

Men's bones also may thin with age, more studies are demonstrating, and the impact can be devastating

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

When geriatrician Cathleen Colon-Emeric, MD, MHSc, worked at the VA Medical Center in Durham, N.C., she noticed that many of her patients with osteoporosis-related hip fractures did not embody the usual image of a patient who confronts such a break.

They were male.

"I had always been taught that osteoporosis was a women's disease," said Dr. Colon-Emeric, now an assistant professor of medicine and senior fellow at Duke University's Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development in Durham. "It actually afflicts a great many men."

She has since published several papers on the subject and is among the growing ranks of physicians recognizing that the reality of osteoporosis doesn't match its perception as a women's disease.

As more evidence of this trend, the American Assn. of Clinical Endocrinologists will issue screening and treatment guidelines for male patients next summer. Meanwhile, a handful of drugs used to increase bone mass in osteoporotic women have been approved in recent years for men, including risedronate sodium (Actonel), which was given the nod by the Food and Drug Administration in August. Also, the International Osteoporosis Foundation's World Congress in Toronto last June featured several studies exploring how this disease occurs in men.

"In the last decade, there's been great attention to public as well as professional education about osteoporosis as a problem in postmenopausal women," said Marc C. Hochberg, MD, MPH, head of the division of rheumatology and clinical immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore. "It's time that we ramp up education that men are at risk as well."